The last thing young men need from their elders is a bugler’s call about the educational system being altered by (God forbid!) some female ethic. Don’t Ken Coates and Clive Keen know that the old gender binary is dead? A more useful line of inquiry would be why some men haven’t kept pace with the progress of feminist thought and how this impacts their understanding of the issues facing today’s young men and prevents them from being relevant in their own sons’ lives.
I’m no expert on the education system but I do know that many young men are opting out of the hierarchical, competitive thinking that has defined the lives of their male predecessors. They’ve seen that striving merely to win leads to emptiness and they’re challenging the lie of their inherent aggression. They’re also hip to the global ramifications of traditional male belief systems. These so-called underachievers don’t want to be a part of a serious, systemic problem, so they’re not playing anymore.
Coates and Keen’s grim, earnest conclusion that “we have ahead of us a bubbling cauldron of conflict, dissatisfaction, and social distress” speaks volumes. Guys, this is what we’ve been faced with for at least the past couple of hundred years and what we’re now trying to work our way out of ! Don’t miss your opportunity to connect with the new generation.
Vancouver, British Columbia
As a professor of women’s studies, I’ve given quite a bit of thought to the issue of underachieving male students (I’ve got a lot invested in men doing well in my classes). My experience of the balance between men and women students in the academy is, of course, atypical. However, the courses I teach are the kind that attract men as well as women, so I do get some opportunity to observe gender differences.
I would agree with most of Coates and Keen’s insights, but I would qualify a couple of things. Yes, lack of engagement is a problem for a higher percentage of my male students than my female students, but when I think back on which of my male students have excelled, it turns out that virtually all of my openly gay male students have been up there with the best of the women. It’s easy to speculate on why gay men would do well in women’s studies, but it would be interesting to have some data on how gay men do across the disciplinary spectrum.
Coates and Keen suggest that the task is “to motivate young men to be more competitive . . . and to enter graduate and professional programs the same way young women have: by being the best among their peers.” My women students tend not to compete with each other but, rather, each with herself. The motivated ones are almost invariably those who are turned on by the desire to do better on the next assignment than they did on the last one. Moreover, the more successful women students are generous with their assistance to less successful ones. Male students tend to compete with one another, so in classrooms like mine, where women greatly outnumber men, there can be a shortage of willing competitors.
Finally, I accept that a growing number of boys lack a live-in father, while others have fathers who are caught in the limbo between the old patriarchal model and a new kind of fathering that men have yet to invent. But whereas fatherless boys used to be able to look to men in high places as role models, which of today’s boys would want to choose from the super-achievers within our corrupt corporate and political cultures, or even our drug-scandalized sports culture? Perhaps when our boardrooms and legislatures reach gender parity, things will change in this regard. Either women will clean up politics and business—in which case, the men involved will be better public role models—or women will prove equally corruptible and men will cease to be the only people identified with corruption. Since women alone can’t clean up the world, the latter is, alas, much more likely.
What we need is a men’s liberation movement—a politically progressive men’s movement, not those expensive self-improvement weekends in the woods where men nurture their warrior within. And certainly not a patriarchal revival: George W. Bush has been demonstrating the consequences of that project and killing a lot of men and boys in the process. Not until men in large numbers kick the habit of postindustrial hyper-individualism and collectively rekindle a broad sense of the public good will boys again have something they want to grow up for.
Diana M. A. Relke
University of Saskatchewan
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