“Scholars of boys and men converged Wednesday at Wagner College, in Staten Island, N.Y., to announce the creation of the Foundation for Male Studies, which will support a conference and a journal targeted at exploring the triumphs and struggles of the XY-chromosomed of the human race — without needing to contextualize their ideas as being one half of a male-female binary or an offshoot of feminist theory. Organizers positioned themselves in contrast to men’s studies, which is seen as based on the same theories as women’s studies and is grouped together with it as gender studies.

More than anything else, the event was a chance for supporters to frame men and boys as an underrepresented minority, and to justify the need for a male studies discipline in a society that many perceive to be male-dominated.

I will never understand the whiny, “poor me” attitude of people who cry about how men are being oppressed by feminism. I just don’t feel all that threatened by a movement that interrogates gender roles and examines how power is distributed among the sexes in social contexts – and, as the article points out, there has been a several decade long history of men’s studies already. So why the need for this?

Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said the field takes its cues “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different” and the “enormous relation between … a person’s biology and their behavior” that’s not being addressed in most contemporary scholarship on men and boys.

“I am concerned that it’s widespread in the United States that masculinity is politically incorrect,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Has Ms. Sommers seen how many women are in the Senate? Has she seen how women are jailed for being prostitutes but their johns, some of whom are still sitting Senators (male of course), are allowed to go free? Has Ms. Sommers paid the slightest attention to the actual distribution of power in our society? It would appear not.

The culprit, said Tiger, is feminism: “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.”

Ok, so let’s try to be clear here: for most academics, the terms “women” and “men” denote gender performance whereas the terms “female” and “male” are often reserved for biological difference. Forget the fact that there is no one monolithic and controlling Bureau of Feminism^TM, the notion that feminism attacks “maleness” is a fundamental misreading of most feminist work. In fact, one might say the framing of feminism as a monolithic and controlling Bureau of Feminism^TM is a hint that this attempt at creating “male studies” is, from the first, a disingenuous and political attempt to carve out a space for sexists and ideologues. This is the same tactic we see being used by the GOP and the Teabaggers and the Wingnuts in an attempt to brand all liberals or progressives or democrats as “socialists” or “fascists.”

It’s sad that supposedly educated and intelligent people feel the need to demonize scholars and thinkers who have struggled to bring some form of gender equality to the world. It’s also sad that they think true worth is measured by the configuration of a person’s genitalia.

How does one become so insecure and petty? I don’t know. I truly don’t have a clue, emotionally, why so many men seem to recognize their own value only through the subjugation of women (whether that subjugation is physical, economic, social, or emotional). I do know that “male studies” reveals far more about those who are founding it than they might want to reveal. As a male, a man, a feminist, an artist, and a scholar, I both feel sorry for these people and pledge to be more active in the pursuit of gender equality, in order to counter their desperate attempt to undo the small but meaningful gains of feminist scholars.

I’ll leave you with opening paragraph from the foundation’s whine website:

A gathering of academicians drawn from a range of disciplines will meet on April 7, 2010, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, to examine the declining state of the male, stemming from cataclysmic changes in today’s culture, environment and global economy. The live teleconferenced colloquium will be chaired by Lionel Tiger, PhD, Rutgers University Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology. It will encompass a broad range of topics relevant to the study of boys and men in contemporary society ranging from their roles in the family and workforce, as well as their physical and emotional health, to the growing problem of misandry—the hatred of males, an unacknowledged but underlying socio-cultural, economic, political and legal phenomenon endangering the well-being of both genders.

Actually, one more thought on this foundation, conference, and journal and the pathetically transparent and demonstrably false supposition that “misandry [is] an unacknowledged but underlying socio-cultural, economic, political and legal phenomenon endangering the well-being of both genders:”

Powered by ScribeFire.

You want some future? How about viruses as batteries, bionic eyes, surveillance that would put Big Brother to shame, and a whole new meaning to the phrase, there’s gold in them thar hills.

Need a break from reading? Check these out:

Dancing Science Thesis Project:
s

This is Science: Helena Reynolds from Matthew Chaboud on Vimeo.

In the Beatle’s Footsteps:

Short CGI animated film that’s long on talent and cool concepts:

Hemlock from Tyson Ibele on Vimeo.

Everything you want in life has teeth.

Ain’t that the truth.

Today is grey and rainy. I’m up early and listening to Pandora.com’s David Sylvian radio station (thanks to John for the recommendation of Sylvian’s work) and wondering where I should start this next entry regarding my romance with academia and grad schools. Throughout the week, I’ve started and discarded a number of openings. I planned on writing this while at work because I had next to nothing to do at my temp job and spent most of each day trying to keep myself from banging my head against the desk just to break the boredom. I found, however, that I couldn’t really concentrate enough in that environment to be productive, so I spent each day compulsively reading the rss feeds from sites like Daily Kos, Pandagon, Feministing, IO9, BoingBoing and about a dozen other, checking my mail every few minutes to see if someone, anyone had written, and contemplating just what the hell was I doing in a corporate office answering phones and making copies.

So I sit here, a cup of tea, the quiet sound of rain and still I wonder how best to talk about my complex feelings toward grad school and I keep coming back to a larger issue that, perhaps, has some bearing on the issue at hand: desire.

Desire may be experienced in the present, but it is always for something outside of the moment. Something from the past or the future. Once the object of desire is possessed, then desire ceases (at least for that particular object). Desire can be a healthy and productive driving force in a persons life. Without desire (for the mother’s breast, for love, for sex, for pleasure, for justice, etc.), there’s not much point to the whole human experiment. Yet, in religion after religion, philosophy after philosophy, pop psychology book after pop psychology book, we come face to face with the recognition that too much desire can be, like too much Rick Astley, a bad thing. Hell, if you are even vaguely Freudian (and who isn’t), our Id desires and our super-ego is there to say, “no.” So we struggle, day in and day out, trying to balance desire against either getting lost in the wild woods of our desiring or placing our very souls into the objects of desire and thereby hollowing ourselves. It is this hollowing out that helps feed our materialism these days. We put our souls into HDTVs or Bose speakers, or iPods, or Macbook Pros (damn those new models are sexy!!), or a million other things. We then hope, when we get those things in our life, that we will recognize ourselves and that the hollow feeling will go away.

Sometimes we invest ourselves in drugs or religions or political parties or other people, setting forth a continual cycle of desire and pursuit that never truly satisfies.¹ Desire is like, to switch metaphors, oxygen. Too little and we can’t truly live. Too much and the air explodes around us, the flames burning us down to blackened bones. Which brings me to Star Wars (through Uncle Owen & Aunt Beru’s burned skeletons), to Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back when he said of Luke that:

All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh. Excitement. Heh. A Jedi craves not these things.” (Link)

And so I circle back to myself and the instant recognition I felt upon hearing Yoda’s pronouncement. I knew, even at eleven years old, that Yoda was talking about me. Writer, Actor, Director, College Professor, Writer (once more), Corporate Consultant, Academic (possibly?): all various careers/goals/plans/futures that I have held in my mind at one point or another. The problem lies not in any of these particular goals, but rather that I have been so busy looking to the horizon that I keep stumbling around the various pot-holes and broken sidewalks of my life. It’s rather difficult to make a long journey if you keep tripping every couple of steps because you refuse to look away from the distance—from your desire—to see what’s around you here and now. Most of my life I have squandered² considerable emotional and intellectual resources just trying to keep my balance because I refused to look more often and more closely at my present surroundings; to invest myself in the now.

No wonder that I struggled with grad school! No wonder that every time I gained some distance from school I wanted to go back. By leaving the tower, I was able to stop tripping over myself in my pursuit of the faraway horizon of desire and could see just what it was that brought me into that ivory tower in the first place: the fact that I love to learn and read and think and write and teach. Because of my “eyes-on-the-horizon” perspective, however, I kept forgetting just how much joy I ought to take in my surroundings. I forgot to recognize the privilege of being in an environment that supports many of the activities that I love; an environment that encourages and challenges me to do them better and better. I saw all of the various challenges of grad school as obstacles because each one raised a bulky shape in front of my vision and broke my view of the horizon; obscured my view of that distant goal, that desired place of “I’m a Tenured Professor Now.”

So, what are you saying, that you should go back to school? Come on, how many times have you gone back and how many times have you left and what’s to say this time will be any different. (That’s an example of the super-ego right there!)

I’m saying, simply, that I need to find a more balanced viewpoint. I’m saying that I want to work on learning how to appreciate the now and to use the horizon more as a reference point rather than an end goal. If pressed, I would say that being in a university setting suits me in ways that other environments don’t and that the tower of academia gives me a sense of community that I haven’t found in other arenas. What last week’s conference reinforced was just how much I enjoyed being around the people who make up academic and university life. Even if I never became a student again in my life, I think it’s important for me to understand why I’ve had such a contentious relationship with an institution that, for all its faults, offers me a great deal of opportunity and joy and community.

1. None of these observations are particularly new, having been made countless times over the course of our history. It seems that each of us must find our own way into this particular territory and just hope that our particular route may provide a few hints and tips for others.
2. Squandered is probably too strong a word if I am going to be fair to myself, but I can’t help feeling that I’ve misspent some of my youth.

So the question becomes, why do I keep disavowing them? Why do I keep leaving academic institutions when they fail to be perfect, when departments and faculty fail to live up to my expectations, or when I find myself having to fight against large and unweildy institutions that do not, it seems, have the best interests of their students at heart? I’m not sure. The past two days, however, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about my relationship to academia and I think romance is an appropriate description of that relationship. There is certainly nothing wrong with romance, but you can’t base a long-term, day-in-day-out relationship solely on the heady stuff of passion and romantic desire. There has to be commitment and friendship and genuine respect and humility. More importantly, there needs to be a kind of submission to the idea of two individuals becoming a third and inclusive category: “us.”

Ok, so maybe I’m going a little overboard with the romance metaphor, but the comparison is an apt one. I’m not good at relinquishing control, whether to insitutions or to loved ones. I am beginning to suspect that my desperate clinging to self-control, and my desire to be emotionally self-sufficient have been partly to blame for my on-again, off-again relationship with grad school. I’ve also been an incredibly unforgiving and judgemental person when it comes to teachers who do not live up to my expectations of how a good teacher ought to perform in the classroom. No, strike that. My expectations go beyond holding faculty to “good” standards: I looked for brilliance in the classroom and when certain men and women failed to live up to these expectations or when they were shown to be bullies or relished their power a bit too much, I scorned them. I refused to forgive. I metaphorically shook my fists at the injustice of it all and found myself wandering away from the whole because of a few parts. I acted like a jealous and betrayed lover: angry, spiteful to the point of self-injury, and unforgiving.

Throughout my relationship with graduate school, I wanted to recapture the first blush of excitement that I found at Rhode Island College when, at 27, I went back to school for my undergraduate degree. Thanks to an incredible English department, I had my mind blown open by feminist and critical theory, by Lacan and Derrida, by Luce Irigaray and Kaja Silverman and a whole host of ideas and questions and thoughts that literally changed how I saw the world. Even though I was a double major in Theatre and English and even though I was just starting to fall in love with directing theatre, it was the classes I had with Richard Feldstein, Kay Kalinak, Claudia Springer, and Joan Dagle that re-worked the wiring of my brain in fundamental ways and made me want to be a graduate student and, someday, an academic. Those years were like the first few weeks of a new romance, when every utterence makes your heart pound and your head spin and you want to stay up all night talking and touching and you feel yourself filled by this recent stranger who suddenly, rushingly, becomes indespensible to your life. The work I did at RIC, the new ideas and thoughts that I was exposed to and wrestled with on a daily basis were so damned sexy. Graduate school, no matter its qood qualities and enticements, is not a sexy process.² Don’t get me wrong, there are delicious moments as a grad student; moments of intellectual excitement and even a mental orgasm here and there, but on a daily basis, sexy it is not.

Let me be completely honest here: I have committment issues when it comes to relationships. I also have committment issues in my academic life. I have, until this weekend, considered these parts of my life to be seperate. Now . . . I’m not so sure. I have a sneaking suspicion that my troubles in one may be reflective of my troubles in the other.

(Link to Part 2)

1. 1) leaving the University of Rhode Island after four years with no degree. 2) Finishing my Masters degree while working full-time and deciding to forgo the PhD program at the University of Maryland even though I was accepted and on fellowship for several more years. 3) Quitting CUNY’s The Graduate School (again despite being on fellowship) after one year and the realization that I was distinctly unhappy with the prospect of spending five to seven more years in NYC and jumping through a series of hoops for several professors that I found it difficult to respect as teachers no matter how much I respected them as scholars.
2. And here I’m mainly referring to MA and PhD programs. MFA programs are sigificantly different and can be very, very sexy.

Ok, so maybe Academia isn’t quite like La Cosa Nostra, and maybe I’m not quite like Al Pacino as he exclaims “Every time I try to get out, they keep pulling me back in”—in large part because I kinda volunteered for this—but despite the whole leaving academia behind trip that I’m on, I just received confirmation that I am returning to NYC in early November to present a paper at the American Theatre Conference at St. Francis College.

The paper is on the Living Theatre and the narrative that has been created about the IRS seizure of their theatre, the subsequent closing of The Brig and how the Living Theatre was able to use those events—or at least the stories about those events—as a kind of symbolic capital that helped sustain the organization throughout the years. Based on archival research, this is a paper that actually uncovers evidence and facts that have fallen out of the “official” biography of the Living Theatre and constitutes my most original and important work as a researcher and academic. I’m hoping to use the conference as a way to help me refine my ideas and to develop a longer paper for publication.

In fact, a larger number of the books that I’m bringing with me to New Mexico are books that I cite in this paper and that I will be using for the expansion. I’m really proud of the work I’ve done on this and am glad I get to share it with others at the conference and hopefully will get it published next year.

Unfortunately, I mis-remembered the dates of the conference and my beautiful plan of coming back to the East Coast for the conference and having that merge into Thanksgiving weekend up in Maine with my Grandparents and that weekend culminating with my 20 year high school reunion. I so did not just type “20 year high school reunion” did I? I did. Frak me!

Point being, the conference is November 7 – 9 and Thanksgiving/Reunion is November 27 – 29. Now, maybe, just maybe I’ll have banked enough money by then to just take nearly a month and hang out on the East Coast writing and visiting friends and family . . . but somehow I kinda doubt it. So that means flying out twice in a space of twenty days. Missing either event is not an option. Hopefully gas prices will have come down a bit by then and flying will be cheaper, but LtL would certainly not refuse an offer of airline points to help offset the airline costs, as it will be used in the spirit of disseminating knowledge (the conference) or . . . or . . . heck, I have no idea what the reunion will offer. I guess the chance to reconnect with old friends. Unfortunately, the term “old” will be more literal than I might like.