To understand masculinity, you have to look everywhere.
I. Happy Hunting, Happy Haunting
In the last two decades, scholars in the fields of gender and sexuality studies—along with genderqueer pop stars, increasingly mainstream gay films, and even the latest brand of “no homo” advertising—have challenged the notion that masculinity either is, or at least should be, only the purview of straight, cisgender men. For the most part, these discourses arose in the 1990s from the integration of men’s studies into the broader field of gender studies, a newly burgeoning field which—for those of us just joining the class—was largely the result of feminism’s far-reaching impact on the academic playing field.
As Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble bothered the seemingly inviolable (if inevitably failing) logics equating one’s sex with one’s gender, and one’s gender with one’s sexuality, the assumptions about identity which sustained the political discourses of the time gave way to the realization that no, not all boys grow up to be the Marlboro Man, and not all girls grow up to be Betty Draper. Quite to the contrary, some women end up with a gender styling more akin to the former, and some men (though, quite frankly, not enough of us) the latter. Accordingly, academic trailblazers like Judith Halberstam questioned the conspicuous absence of dialogues about masculine-identified women, transfolks, and gay men in courses and anthologies of essays on masculinity studies.
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The idea for my own course last fall, then, was to take these developments in the field of masculinity studies as the starting point for my students’ inquiries into masculinity. This seemed advantageous for a few reasons. First and foremost, it became clear to me early in my thinking about the course that there were a number of lines of investigation that would not contribute to intellectually constructive (or even pleasant) discussion.
As Sally Robinson argues in her illuminating essay “Pedagogy of the Opaque,” a number of paradigms have come to govern contemporary discourses about masculinity. Chief among these is the “oppressor/oppressed” paradigm, whereby either women are the victims of ongoing patriarchal power structures from which men inevitably (ambivalently?) profit, or men are the castrated and condescended victims of an aggressive feminist uprising from which women inevitably (ambivalently?) profit.[1] While this sort of thinking makes for catchy sloganeering (what the kids these days call “trolling,” I believe), it’s nothing if not reductive. Moreover, as Robinson points out, “The oppressor/oppressed paradigm limits what can be learned about masculinity because it sets up a binary relation between the empowered and the disempowered that reproduces the same narrative regardless of historical or cultural context.”
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Playing into easy narratives of men in crisis, feminisms that have lingered on past their use-by dates, and even tried-and-still-untrue bullshit about Mars and Venus at cosmic war, these old approaches don’t leave much room for telling (or reading) other stories about masculinity.
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Similarly, Robinson finds problems with a simplified (if more pluralistic) model of studying “alternative” (read: “good”) models of masculinity set against “traditional” (read: “bad”) masculinities. While this second paradigm acknowledges that there are as many types of masculinity as there are masculine subjects—or simply performances of masculinity, identities be damned—it nevertheless leads to an “attack/applaud” mode of thought that is both prescriptive and simply doesn’t push things far enough; so, it still maintains a binary of either/or masculinities.
For Robinson, as for me, the problem with both of these ways of thinking and teaching masculinity is that they lead to a pedagogical experience in which
students come to feel that, for feminism, the only way to reconstruct masculinity is to destroy it altogether. Understanding that masculinity is in some sense a “problem” to be studied, students imagine that such a course might offer a cure for what ails men, but as anyone who attends to the growing American concern with the problem of masculinity can attest, there is a great deal of disagreement about whether feminism is the cure or part of the disease.
Such frameworks thus both misrepresent the richness of thought—feminist, queer, or otherwise—on masculinity, and fail to offer a way to consider it apart from knee-jerk political reactions and identity claims. Playing into easy narratives of men in crisis, feminisms that have lingered on past their use-by dates, and even tried-and-still-untrue bullshit about Mars and Venus at cosmic war, these old approaches don’t leave much room for telling (or reading) other stories about masculinity. And so, I found some new ones. I went hunting.
For stories, that is. It turns out that maybe the “cure for what ails” modern masculinity isn’t simply to throw out or demonize old stories about masculinity—many of which are as compelling and sympathetic as they are reprehensible—but simply to tell more stories, about more kinds of people who gives us more ways to think about masculinity, and who find it worth incorporating into their own understandings of how best their gender might be rendered. That some of these “more kinds of people” are women, transfolks, and gay men—people who have, as the historical story goes, been at odds with the sorts of power and privilege which masculinity usually confers—goes a long way toward disrupting not only the assumptions we make about who is masculine, but also about why and how masculinity is such a persistent, historically flexible, and sometimes even downright attractive cultural phenomena—not just in spite of its flaws, but also sometimes for them.
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Accordingly, my working thesis for my course—though not necessarily my students’—might go something like this: Despite its usual associations with subjects whom we might crassly and easily group together as “men,” masculinity is in fact most apparent from its margins[2]; when it is embodied, practiced, and desired by subjects whose relationship to masculinity mark their performances of it as intriguing, troubling, irrelevant, hyper-stylized, unconvincing, more-than-real, counter-intuitive, or any other emotional shorthand for “mixed up.” What this means, I think, is that masculinity might be best described not in the cultural venues where is thought most glamorously to “succeed”—Super Bowls, cozy family sitcoms, Wall Street bankers in pin-striped suits—but in those instances when it is made culturally legible by those subjects whose performances of masculinity are not spectacular, but spectral; those moments which uneasily and beautifully haunt the means by which we come to recognize masculinity as a cultural form in the first place.
In other words, if masculinity was ever conceived as the unproblematic purview of the “manly man”—indeed, if such a “manly man” ever existed outside the nostalgic mode, which seems to be the preferred frame of vision for American culture’s latest bout of willful amnesia—then the last two decades of work on masculinity have thoroughly killed the relevance of such a notion. My course would be about masculinity’s surprisingly rich afterlife.
Needless to say, perhaps, the grand narrative of my course was one of mixed emotions.
Next: Lesbians, Transmen, and Bears, Oh My!
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About Kaelin Alexander
Wonderful piece. I minored in Queer Studies and it was the best choice I ever made!
Men’s studies follows ideological feminism and is a sub-group of women’s studies.
Hopefully, male studies will correct this ideological bias.
I’m a sociologist who has made his peace with biological takes on sex/gender. Yes, there’s huge variation, but gender more or less centers itself on sex. I get a kick out of reading postmodern approaches at times, but I think that they unfortunately lead us away from truths we don’t want to face. I read Judith Butler, and believe that she mainly writes drivel, however. What should make us suspicious is that it’s English departments coming up with this stuff. They have no commitment to anything empirical, and no relationship these days to any cogent theory.
I agree with what you are saying, and I apologize in advance BUT …
When it comes to “empirical” reasoning, why is peer review failing in Sociology?
I avoid Humanities research as much as I can. However, I recently had unavoidable contact with two very deeply flawed papers, both in a journal called “Sex Roles”. Here is one of them.
The paper attempts to establish hiring bias by white males using a sample size of 80. The authors had to include 5 self-selected “non-earnest” participants in order to reach a ridiculously thin X2 certainty of 96% (why even have a non-earnest check box if you intend to include them in the analysis?!?) Based on this garbage data, they propose that (1) white males discriminate AGAINST white males when the other candidate is black and (2) white males discriminate IN FAVOUR of white males when the other candidate is a woman.
In my field, certainties to better than 1 part in a million are the norm when additional data is easy to acquire. How did Sociology sink to the point where 95% confidence is considered adequate, even though additional data could be obtained by putting a box of questionnaires next to the cafeteria coffee pot?!?
Sociology can very frequently be called the “Church of Sociology,” because journals are procrustrian in what they publish, and ideological. (By the way, I’m not going to be impressed by your field unless I know what it is, and maybe not then…) You’re generalizing, which you know of course.
The study you cite, even if true, is not generalizable in any way, so it’s not science in any way. It MIGHT be program evaluation, which isn’t science but does tell programs what they’re doing.
By the way, I don’t know of any sociologists who leave questionaries out by the cafeteria. You sound like a jerk.
“I’m not going to be impressed by your field unless I know what it is”
I am not impressed by my field either. Biology. Usual publication limit is 99.99% or better certainty, which is far from adequate. Better than Sociology though.
“The study you cite, even if true, is not generalizable in any way, so it’s not science in any way.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2004, Vol. 87, No. 6, 817–831. I agree, it is not science, it is junk. But they think it is science.
“I don’t know of any sociologists who leave questionaries out by the cafetera.”
Participants were male undergraduates approached by either a male or female experimenter in campus dining halls. << quote from paper.
"You sound like a jerk."
I am a jerk.
Sociology is more stochastic, probabalistic. When done well. When not done well, it’s bs, of course. Snowball sampling isn’t scientific, at all.
I’m a jerk at times too.
Ha! Has to be the same Henry Vandenberg: “Snowball sampling is meaningless…”
I remember that well from discussion group.
Henry, snowball sampling is meaningless IF one presumes to build a statistical argument. If one intends to build a descriptive picture, a Weberian ideal type, it’s not a horribly unscientific methdology
And I’d be more impressed with YOU if you spelled my named right. I doubt if Weber would have snowball sampled. Not his thing. What discussion group?
Just a quick personal question: are you the same Henry Vandenberg who was a grad student in the UW Madison sociology department back in the mid 1980s?
No, I’m a 66 year old University of Texas PhD (1996). Got it late in life. I have a masters from UC Irvine from 1982.
What about those of us who only bathe in their blood because we’re kinda bored on a Tuesday night? If only they programmed something good on TV then for me…
I kinda think if someone’s going to accuse a piece of being a “hate-rant,” he should at least support that accusation with arguments and evidence.
Or, hey, maybe he thinks everyone will just take his word for it.
Color me unimpressed with some of these MRAs who are showing up to defend their movement.
Are you serious?
The author rants for two pages about how male characteristics are evil, wrong, twisted, yada yada yada. Then he proposes that all men adopt a new identity based on what he says. The English major and ultimate authority on who men should be. Of course, he did not come up with any of it. Both his “malignant man” diagnosis and his”benevolent woman” cure are straight from the feminist play book.
At first Antz, I didn’t feel right with your position, rereading the last paragraph it became clear and I have to agree with you. I simply replaced the view from masculine to feminine and realized that it’s bullshit. Femininity and it’s definition now belongs to women, Feminism has removed the discussion of cultural style of the feminine. Apparently masculinity (me) should be available to every estrogen contortion imaginable. Screw that!
Antz, did you even bother to read the piece? Where does Kaelin situate masculinity as “malignant” and women as “benevolent”? The entire thrust of his argument is that this sort of simplistic and reductionist dichotmoy should be rejected.
My point exactly, it’s too hard to understand. Life is too short.
I read this article three times in an effort to translate it into English. Near as I can tell, the author is saying there are many stories of manhood. Yes?
Wrong. The author is saying there are many storis of manhood, and he is the only one who can tell them.
Isn’t that really the mandate of this site, to tell you and me what our stories are.
Why don’t you leave the site then?
Oooo… someone stepped on a nerve.
most of the articles go above my head too, and I thought this was a site for men, plain simple, not convoluted insane rubbish. I think I read an article about a woman wanting the guy to have a sex change and then dying in a tent, or something, insane shit… this whole site is full of weird people writing their insanity and having it being published
At the same time, we need to acknowledge, finally, that “masculinity” as a cultural style was never properly even “ours” to begin with.
I think that depends on how one defines masculinity. I think masculinity belongs to men in the same way that Japanese culture belongs to the Japanese. It is defined by the attributes of the people to created and largely perpetuate it. Is it possible for someone outside of a culture to adopt the mannerisms and seemingly become a part of it? Yes, but that would not make American otaku Japanese anymore than it makes Japanese kids obsessed with African American culture African Americans.
This does not mean that any of the qualities associated with masculinity can only be performed by males. It just means that masculinity is simply the way in which males behave. I think starting from that position would give people a better insight into how masculinity functions in cultures. Granted, that does not fit well with the progressive liberal position that masculinity is a social construct that can be adopted by anyone because there is no gender, no actual male or female. It does, however, fit the general position the average person takes in regard to gender and sex.
First of all, culture is not property in the same way that language is not property. Culture and language are forms of symbol manipulation, not objects which can be owned. So nothing cultural “belongs” to anyone in particular. Either you know French and speak it or you don’t. You don’t have to get the French government’s permission to speak it and you don’t have to pay royalties to do so.
Likewise, masculinity is a series of styles and attitudes, behaviors and positionings. It doesn’t “belong” to men. Anyone who can pull it off is masculine. I know some incredibly masculine women, for example.
As to how males behave, there’s a huge variety of male behaviors. I don’t think you can give me an example of any one male behavior – outside of some few strictly biological things (i.e. ejaculates sperm) – that men from all cultures do and which isn’t done by women, anywhere.
There just ain’t any such animal.
The so-called “liberal position on masculinity” (and why you slapsomething that’s fairly damned conservative with that adjective is beyond me) is the scientific consensus today not because of any political conspiracy, buit because that’s what the evidence points to.
Knowing French would not make one French. Behaving in manners that are common in French society would not make one French either. That is what I meant by culture belonging to a group. It is the same a person’s style or manner of speaking. Most of the pop musicians imitate Michael Jackson’s style and music, but they are not him, even those doing their best to literally sound like him.
The issue is not whether women can engage in the same behaviors that men do. Of course they can. The point is about how we distinguish masculinity from femininity. If one argues that masculinity is something anyone can do, then why call it masculinity? Why associate it with males? That association implies that we are not just looking at a set of general behaviors, but looking at how those behaviors manifest themselves in males. My point is that this is all masculinity is: the way males behave.
Regarding your final remarks, the progressive liberal position on masculinity is not based on objective evidence, but subjective opinion. There is no objective evidence proving that masculinity is a social construct. There is not even a way we can ethically begin to demonstrate that. What little we can do through observation suggests that there may be ways males are more likely to behave and some cultures may reinforce some of those behaviors with social and culture expectations. That blurs the line, and may make it appear that human behavior is a pure social construct even though that may not be true.
Actually, and I say this reluctantly, the liberal position on masculinity is mainly incorrect. The sociobiological constraints on gender behavior are fairly compelling, although I admit there’s culture variation that’s epiphenomenal. NB I’m not the other Henry on here, if anyone’s confused.
I never had a problem with feminine men being feminine and masculine women being women. If that is their nature then go for it, but what feminism tries to do is make men to be feminine and women to be masculine. It’s just as bad for a naturally masculine men, which is the majority of males biologically, to be castrated, which is what feminism does, it pulls them back, tells them they are wrong to have urges and makes parents think they need to be on drugs for ADD. And tells women that they should not be nurses or stay at home moms, and should go out and get a career, even if being at home mom is something they want to do.
Even in the gay community there is going to be a masculine male and a feminine male, I know being masculine, I get a lot of attention from feminine gay men, but I didn’t get that attention by being a pussy myself, and yet feminism is systematically destroying guys like me until one day women are going to wonder why the only good MEN out there are insane assholes and the rest are just a bunch of pussy whipped wimps
I don’t like the words masculine and feminine anyway because there really are no definitions for what they are. Plus, they imply a type of superiority and inferiority complex as well. Masculine has always been seen as superior , and femininity has always been seen as inferior. For example: if a guy acts feminine, whatever that is, he’s construed as gay, a pussy (which is a degrading term, not only to men, but to women as well, and most people don’t even realize it), a wimp, a sissy boy. Yet, if a woman acts masculine, she is often seen as empowered, a girl who doesn’t need to rely on a man to get ahead in the world. Masculinity has a more positive definition than femininity. With masculinity, there is an implication that you are strong and empowered. With femininity, there is an implication you are soft and meek and weak. I don’t like either words, so I say we throw out those words altogether and stop trying to define what they are. Just define yourself as an individual on an individual basis. I don’t define myself as masculine or feminine. I define myself as a person who knows what she wants and won’t let anyone stop her. I hope that isn’t defined as a masculine trait, because than that would mean the opposite, femininity, would suggest I don’t know what I want and I let people walk all over me.
Have you considered dropping the “Y” from your name? What’s great about masculine women is for allot of men it means one less person to take care of. I think it’s great if you realize that femininity limits your potential hey, get rid of it. Many men are just sick and tired of women back seat driving their masculinity. Get your own car or walk. Unfortunately feminism for many means surrendering your individuality to some homogenized expression of equality that you don’t get to define. Which is like being walked on.
“what feminism tries to do is make men to be feminine and women to be masculine”
Indeed. I truly believe feminism started because some women were jealous of men and wanted to be them, but they could never take men’s place unless they destroyed men as masculine first. Feminists are angry because they were not born men and they believe femininity is inferior. That’s why they tell women that a career is more important than a family.
This hurts men and women alike.
Feminism is pure hate. Feminists hate men, they hate women, they hate themselves, and they damn well hate civilization.
Keith: “What’s great about masculine women is for allot of men it means one less person to take care of. ”
I always looked at relationships as a means that you support and take care of each other, possibly in different ways. I ideally know my best relationships are with men that are different from me because we each have our hidden talents we bring to the table. THis doesn’t make me less of a person or woman.
Keith: “I think it’s great if you realize that femininity limits your potential hey, get rid of it. ”
Does your masculinity limit your potential Keith?
My femininity does not limit my potential.
——————————–
Jay Hammers:Indeed. I truly believe feminism started because some women were jealous of men and wanted to be them…”
Some woman did want to be a man. Because our world sells the idea everyday that being a man is better, more worthy, more important. It *is* a man’s world. Men still earn more then women, men still hold most of the top jobs. But Feminims was more about women having more rights. Lets be honest, they didn’t have the rights men did.
Even today, Angelina Jolie is the top earning actress and makes 27 million. Johnny Depp is the highest earning actor and he makes 75 million. That’s a HUGE pay gap between the two highest paid professional actors in the world.
Erin: interestingly, so do I, unfortunately I never found it to be reciprocal, it is a nice ideal and at times less than ideal is disappointing but not disheartening. Having a partner or friend for that matter that can appreciate your uniqueness regardless of gender, but in context to your sensitivity to a relationship is a gift to enjoy. I have learned a great deal from women, in fact in my younger years I made it a strong focus to learn from women. I spent three years of my life as an apprentice to women. I worked as a housekeeper to wealthy Jewish woman and took care of their homes and carried out services for their families. I may know and understand a little more than you think. The response was directed at Emily, whom I think has some flawed thinking about her gender. Although my response was rigid, I really don’t think she should consider her gender from a weak position. I spent 12 years running a business that offered a support service to entrepreneurial women and each that I dealt with enjoyed very successful businesses. I’ve done my bit for queen and country, I owe nothing to feminism. Its time for some fair exchange. I will spend the balance of my days advocating for mens rights and an opportunity for men to move forward to a healthier outcome with their children. As far as Angelina Jolie ……get a new agent. This isn’t a wage disparity, it’s an idiot for an agent. She also doesn’t command the same following as Depp. Two different franchises.
The example of Angelina and Johnny Depp is another example of how the pay gap is more about performance than discrimination.
Another example, a couple of years ago I had a couple of spare tickets to the Men’s and Women’s Australian Open Tennis finals. The men’s tickets were sold out months before and I could give them back, after several hour effort I sold the womens tickets for just over half price. I watched both finals, the womens final was good, the mens was better. The top women just can’t play tennis at the same standard as the top men. Yet lower earnings of women tennis players are portrayed as discrimination.
You’ve completely mischaracterized feminism and thus attack a straw man.
Feminism does not force women to have careers. It defends the unpaid labor of being a stay at home mom if that is what woman wants to do… and it works to make the world more accepting of stay at home dads by peeling away these strict gender rules.
Henry, the gender gap feminists say that women should be in equal numbers in top jobs. If women choose to stay at home and look after children they are ineligible for top jobs. Quotas for politicians, boards and top executives assume that women will participate in the workforce at roughly the same rate as men. By implication it is saying that women should get out and be equal in the workforce and it is prescribing quotas.
Housework is NOT unpaid. It is untaxed. My wife is currently a stay at home housewife. She drives a Mercedes-Benz, plays tennis 3 times a week, travels overseas every year to see her relatives and buys whatever she wants (no that much really). Her friends live even more extravagant “unpaid” lives.
Sure there are some hard done by “unpaid” housewives, but in contrast there are plenty that live quite comfortable lives while their husbands work 60+ hours per week. The idea of housework being unpaid is a lie, there average housewife gets her fair share of household income.
And yes, I support men who want to be stay at home dads, it’s a pity more women don’t.
Although erudite in execution, there are gremlins lurking in the flowerbed and hiding behind the flowers.
“Part of the risk we run whenever we undertake the onerous task of finding and exposing the misogynistic, misandrist, or otherwise “bad” underpinnings of a cultural artifact is that what we end up finding—the “wrongness” of it—might be painfully obvious, and also might not be the whole story.”
There is no risk whatsoever, when our sensibilities are contained and reside in consumerism. We simply migrate the inventory for a better fit. As is the case in this culture and particularly with the shopping class.Well represented by our statistical awareness.
To naively seek out surprises of insight and understanding, to move to those deeper reaches is wholly a personal journey and personal experience. It may be where our personal humanity lurks in a genderless womb. Or where we may form the courage to take the risk of redefining ourselves. First by thought or imagination.
This to me is separate from what I believe could understandably be described as MARKETPLACE MASCULINITY. To which I would agree that men in fact do not possess, never have and if feminism has it’s way, never will possess that identity.
“students come to feel that, for feminism, the only way to reconstruct masculinity is to destroy it altogether.”
A little hunting of my own: When I pulled up in the delivery truck with the customers new bed they greeted me in the driveway. All’s ready and we’ve made a space, to which I asked What do mean? Well you can take it right in. Sir, I replied you’ll have to call your wife to help you carry it in. As mandated by feminism, my traditional masculinity has been deemed unacceptable, or in simple terms we don’t carry anything anymore.
But there’s two of you in the truck. Well sir that’s for my protection against angry customers, it’s part of our take back the day program.
MARKETPLACE MASCULINITY is a wide and diverse dichotomy of real men acting out roles as a product offering for monetary affirmation. The ubiquitous representation of feminist polemics
may not aptly represent the marketability of my masculinity to my client base.
To suggest that a man clothe himself in a marketplace mentality of utility for 12 hours a day, and sensually disrobe himself to reveal his broader context for two hours,is an unrealistic expectation of utility.
When someone who barely understands the varied burdens that accompany my masculinity starts to tell me to “man up” I would like to invite them to lift the other end of my load. It is a worthwhile notion that men should re-evaluate their MARKETPLACE MASCULINITY and renegotiate the price structure, after all women sell a pretty package that rarely reflects the substance of the product. Why can’t we?
Men are discussing the nails in their hands and in their feet, whereas women are just N.O.W. going out to get fitted.
Feminism is a tired and boring ideology that only offers the entertainment of “Tampon Tipping” which has replaced “Cow Tipping”.
my, what a lot of invective for a piece that was trying to do some good along the lines of gender, masculinity, neo-feminism. what a lot of people forgetting this course was offered and played out within the context of cornell university’s critical community, where queer studies are already established, and where people who disagreed with kaelin’s approaches and theoretical groundwork were perfectly free to . . . drop the course.
for my part, i’m glad you’re fighting the good fight, kaelin, getting people to see the performance aspects of gender, to realize it’s narrow either-or’s that oppress us and not the feminists fighting them who do, and to see that, when we’re unmoored from outdated norms, we all benefit from gender-play.
i wish my first-year writing experience way-back-when had gone as kaelin’s did, and wish the students i teach were as receptive as his are (yes, i’m also in the apparently hated discipline of english). it’s telling that kaelin’s 18 year-olds can accept so much more than can so many of the adults on this site . . .
cheers,
Kaelin’s piece gets my vote for best article published re: MRAs in this issue of the GMP.
It’s a very good piece.
Omigosh, this is one of those pieces that just screams, “I’m so very smart that I can spend a whole bunch of time writing about something of which I know little, with parametrical remarks to obfuscate the subject matter, so I an impress those that don’t understand what I’m writing.”
Give it a rest buddy.
Masculinity is much like sausage, you just don’t wanna know what it is, but you know it when you see it and most likely will like it when you do.
Wow, you find this article complicated and hard to read…?
@Thaddeus Gregory Blanchette,
It all hinges on whether you treat life as a lived experience or as an abstract intellectual exercise.
I thought you were being sarcastic … until I read your previous comments.
It’s obviously both. And, just as obviously, the author realizes that. Kaelin’s pretty clear about how this experience effects him, personally, as lived.
“It’s obviously both” really? Life is a lived experience, abstract intellectual exercises are activities we do while living, they are not life itself.
There was little clear in that article, it reads like stream-of-consciousness post modern drivel. I would really like a translation, maybe using concise and accessible language would help? Seriously, Kaelin probably has something worthwhile to say, he just didn’t deliver in this article.
Dude, Kaelin’s talking about how trying to teach modern gender theory in even a supposedly liberal institution such as the university makes him piss his pants in fear of being called a “preeeeeevert” and “sexshual maniac”.
It doesn’t get more “lived experience” than that, my man. And it’s unworthy of you to belittle another man’s lived experience just because it doesn’t personally connect to yours.
As for the article’s “inaccessible language”, what esoteric words are tripping you up, exactly? “Trailblazers” and “demonize”?
How about this: point to a direct quote of Kaelin’s that you find impenetrable.
Just because you are unwilling to understand what he’s talking about doesn’t mean its unintelligible.
Thaddeus G. Blanchette
You said,
“Kaelin’s talking about how trying to teach modern gender theory in even a supposedly liberal institution such as the university makes him piss his pants in fear of being called a “preeeeeevert” and “sexshual maniac”.”
So that’s why he wrote in code? Seriously, I understood all the words, but the writing is unnecessarily complicated.
Thanks for the translation.
“Any professor who says they aren’t terrified when walking in to meet students on their first day teaching a new class is either lying or tenured—probably both… At any rate, I was more than slightly nervous walking into a classroom last fall to teach a First-Year Writing Seminar at Cornell University. And, along with the usual beginning-of-the-semester uncertainties, I also found my mind wandering to far more imposing worries. After all, this wasn’t just any class; for the first time in my career it was wholly my course, from conception to execution. This wasn’t a Freshman Comp rubric I was handed three months before classes started, this was shit I cared about; this was queer studies; this was masculinity studies; this was English 1105.101: “Lesbians, Transmen, and Bears, Oh My!”
Wow, John, you’re right! That’s some heavy-duty English Kaelin’s using there. Words like “rubric” and “freshman comp”. Yeah, I can see how that would confuse people.
Seriously man: either you’re arguing in incredibly bad faith or you have serious difficulties understanding standard written English.
Or – more likely – you simply assume that anyone who’s writing about men from an non-MRA perspective needs must be anti-male. You made that assumption without reading a word of what Kaelin wrote and now are too embarassed to admit that you’ve judged an article by its cover page.
Or possibly I’m a tired, busy person reading a lot disappointing articles on a crap website that keeps refreshing and came across an article completely out of place.
Now if I had the time and was reading that piece, sitting in a comfortable lounge chair in a library somewhere or possibly in a study with a glass of sherry handy, I would have given it time. Yes, the second page is more readable than the first, yes he makes some good points and to be fair, he probably didn’t write it for this publication.
I agree, his ideas are good and they are simple enough. However, the criticism that the work is difficult to read is valid, even if it was expressed harshly. He says how emotional the experience was, but then his writing is detached and drifting. Yes Thaddeus, I did understand the words, the problem being there were too many of them in some of his sentences.
In the end, who am I, a high school dropout, to question the writing of a PhD student or a professor? My point is that if it was more readable, more people would read it or it was more accessible, more people would access it and his ideas would spread and world would be a better place – just some reader feedback.
You’ll find a better written article here http://goodmenproject.com/ethics-values/playing-the-victim/
And now I go bed late again…