Universities across the nation are taking steps to actively purge male students of what’s been labeled “toxic masculinity.”Examples abound of campuses hosting training sessions, group meetings, lectures and other programs to effectively cleanse what many campus leaders and left-leaning scholars contend is an unhealthy masculinity in young men today.On campus, toxic masculinity is often blamed for sexual violence, body shaming, a “hyper-masculinized sporting culture,” acts of domestic terrorism and much more.
For example, a class at Dartmouth College this semester, “The Orlando Syllabus,” identifiesso-called toxic masculinity as playing a role in the mass murder spree at a Florida club during the summer. This despite the fact that the gunman, Omar Mateen, told police on the phone as he committed the massacre he did it on behalf of ISIS.
Other instances of combating toxic masculinity on campus can be found at both the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and Duke University, which launched programs specifically designed for male students to delve into “violent masculinity” and “healthier masculinity” and discuss issues like gender fluidity.
“How has the concept of masculinity contributed to the perpetration of violence in our society?” asks the UNC Men’s Project website.
Duke University started a similar program this semester for male students to reflect on topics such as patriarchy, male privilege, rape culture, pornography, machismo and “the language of dominance,” Fox News reported.
At a mandatory freshmen orientation training at Gettysburg College in August, male students had to watch a documentary which stated in part that the “three most destructive words” a boy can hear growing up is “be a man.” The freshmen also went through breakout sessions in which they were told mass shooting sprees are rooted in toxic masculinity.
The “Thrive” club, part of the Claremont colleges consortium which meets as a “safe space” to talk about mental health, advertises that “masculinity can be extremely toxic to our mental health, both to the people who are pressured to preform it and the people who are inevitably influenced by it.”
The group refuses to disclose the contents of its discussions due to “confidentiality concerns,” but students who attended one of the sessions reported that there was “a common consensus that masculinity is harmful both to those who express it and those affected by it,” the Claremont Independent reported.
Various promotional videos promoting health masculinity advocate challenging “the traditional norms of what we envision masculinity to be” by recognizing “male privilege.” Goals touted through the education include undoing a legacy of “harm, oppression and dominance.”
This trend did not emerge over night. Last year, Vanderbilt University hosted “Healthy Masculinities Week,” led in part by Jackson Katz, the first man to minor in women studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Katz criticized actors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone for their muscular physiques, which have gotten “larger” over the years. According to the presentation, “hyper-masculinized sporting culture” has also advanced unhealthy masculinity.So we can see what kind of ground was being plowed with the "gender fluidity" crap from a few years ago. The endgame was always going to be eradicating maleness.
I think it's ironic that this is occurring at the time when the nation is momentarily setting aside its raw political divisions to celebrate the Chicago Cubs winning its first World Series in 108 years. The television coverage last night was so great, the way it zeroed in on facial expressions and bits of conversation. There was so much heart, so much character on that field. So much well-earned pride in palpable accompli;ishment. And all in the context of a game played by men, invented by men, but watched by all who derive joy from seeing masculinity applied to a high purpose, from seeing real beauty in the motion and laser focus of human beings who don't just happen to be male. Maleness is at the core of their identity.
Universities, unlike ball diamonds, are sewers of madness, where denial of the basic architecture of the universe is hailed as a fundamental value.
Time to trot out a phrase that needs to be employed often but that must not become cliche: culture is upstream from politics. Until this spiritual rottenness gets fixed, all the policy wonkery in the world is going to be a mere band-aid.
What do you expect in a world of unmanned drones that can kill hundreds, maybe millions some day in one shot. We used to be able to make millions in one shot, we went from coming to going.
ReplyDeleteFuture generations of swinging dicks will never know the glory of battle, just the gore if they happen to be under that bomb. That might be where women will excel. They always have had to clean up the mess.
ReplyDeleteBut there is a righteous and noble way to be a man, and these campus jackboots are determined to stop that out. Baby with the bathwater.
ReplyDelete"stomp"
ReplyDeleteThey start trying to get at us in nursery school.
ReplyDeleteHenry Miller had it right with his hookers.
ReplyDeleteAsk anyone. Like Sebastian Horsley, England’s low-rent Oscar Wilde. “The difference between sex for money and sex for free,” he writes, “is that sex for money always costs a lot less.” Money is the elephant in every bedroom, making your parents’ constant presence look positively bourgeois.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/books/review/Bentley-t.html
Drone pilots sit in a windowless closet of a room for 12 hour shifts. Guess which sex is going to do this better. Beating us at our own game.
ReplyDeleteFew question that life's greatest drives are to reproduce and to avoid death. The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the French social theorist Michel Foucault argued that the two are fused, that the death instinct pervades sexual activity—a connection easily seen by a Frenchman whose language frames orgasms as petit mort, or "mini-deaths." With the AIDS epidemic their view has become particularly poignant. A 1992 study from Amsterdam, for instance, found that about one in six U.S. soldiers surveyed said that sex without condoms was worth the risk of getting the AIDS virus. A year later a story released by Planned Parenthood counselor offices in San Antonio, Texas, explained how teenage girls were demonstrating their toughness by having unprotected sex with an HIV-infected gang member. It seems that, for some, sexual desire is intensified in the presence of taboos and boundaries, even deadly ones.
ReplyDeleteRead more: http://www.deathreference.com/Py-Se/Sex-and-Death-Connection-of.html#ixzz4P2OT84sw