The Failure of Gender Studies
Lately, there has been a lot of stir at Wabash over proposed changes in the curriculum of the college. One of the hottest topics has been whether Wabash students should be required to take a class in what is called “gender studies”. Is there something about Wabash or something about education in general that makes studying gender necessary for liberally educated men?
It’s easy to see that while requiring students to take classes in it may be a separate question, thinking about it in some way is necessary. The purpose of Wabash College is to educate men. That has been true ever since the founding of the College. However, the meaning of that fact has changed. When Wabash was founded, that the students were exclusively men was not a unique feature. In fact, it was a feature that was shared by every college in America at the time. Now, however, it is not only almost unique, it is a very deliberate, self-conscious part of Wabash’s identity. The all-male student body is one of Wabash’s constitutive, self-defining characteristics, one of the things that separate us from other schools. We as a community define ourselves by gender (among other things). Hence, forming a self-definition that is reflective and meaningful requires finding a way of thinking about gender that is relevant to Wabash.
The next question, then, is: what is gender in the first place? This is where we start to see some of the complications that make gender studies such a polarizing issue, for there is no consensus even on the first fundamental question. One of the first points to come up is always whether gender is socially and individually constructed and, as such, endlessly pliable, or whether it is a fact of nature that cannot be changed. Those who take the former position are suspected of being hubristic, godless, secularist Frankensteins who want to subvert, deconstruct, and reinvent human nature. This, of course, is simply an instantiation of the familiar nature vs. nurture debate in psychology, but psychologists themselves have long abandoned treating that question as a simple binary. People’s experiences and the society they live in interact in complex ways with their genetics, and trying to separate the two rigidly with artificial walls—or clinging, as many people do in the area of gender, to a sharp distinction between the biological and the mental—is not only unspiritual but unscientific. Those who get too riled up, then, when they see people “confusing” gender and sex are a little confused themselves.
Gender only comes in two basic flavors, masculine and feminine. Academics are interested in studying both, but this does not assuage the fears of students who think gender studies is an excuse for feminist indoctrination. It’s quite true that academia these days is heavily slanted toward feminism. Now, it seems that every time this point comes up, someone claims that feminism is simply a matter of equality and fairness—equal pay for equal work and such. This is a half-truth at best. A wide range of things go by the name of feminism, and it is not talk of equality that makes many students fear that feminism is an assault on manhood. As we shall see, those fears have a quite rational basis.
Occasionally there are events on campus with the avowed purpose of demonstrating the value of applying the dialectical techniques of the liberal arts to questions of gender. Dr. Rosenberg’s argument that we need a required gender studies course was the most recent such event; another was the talk by Tom Digby that I wrote about in this publication last year. Sharp-eyed observers have noticed a pattern in these events: all of them take an attitude toward traditional masculinity that is a priori distrustful, and this leads to conclusions about certain masculine characteristics that would not hold up for a minute if these traits were given the benefit of the doubt and presumed innocent until proven guilty.
The evils of masculine competition, for example, are a common theme. It is frequently pointed out that athletic competition—especially the “manly” sports like football—involves players trying at least symbolically to subjugate each other. The one who fails and comes under the other’s yoke assumes—we are told—the degrading role of a woman. His masculinity has failed and he has lost his identity. It is easy to see the terrible psychological consequences this will have on the practitioners of such competition—the fear, the stress, the deliberate rooting out of compassion and love, the emotional stuntedness. The loser is forcibly stripped of his human identity and the winner, in order to force his will on the loser, must dehumanize himself, only to go on to further oppress women, whom he has deprived of their dignity by symbolically associating the loser with them. It is a horrifying story.
But it’s a dubious one. It contains much that is true, but it is applied with a broad brush. The broad application is usually implied, not stated. It is often presented, when the question comes up at all (and it does not unless someone really presses it), as a possibility, as something that happens some of the time, as something to keep in mind. That is, rarely will anyone come right out and say that traditional masculinity is unredeemable. No one has to say it. Like a teenage girl who has been absorbed in reading the Twilight books until love, to her, comes to mean a devouring, obsessive passion that literally sucks life away, the feminists (pardon me, but the label is convenient, since that’s invariably what they are) fail to describe situations other than the sensational one, so that what is ostensibly a worst-case scenario becomes the master narrative.
It would be foolish to claim that the suspicion of traditional masculinity has no grounds at all. If it did not, no one would ever have experienced fear or stress because of sports. No child would ever have been ostracized on the playground for being a slow runner, no boy would ever have been beaten in an English boarding school for skipping a football match, and no one would have been led by social pressure to waste hours watching games on TV that bore them to tears. That would be a better world than the one we have. What goes wrong in these situations is that what should be a game is assigned the importance of something in real life. Play is supposed to be a safe way to enact situations that would be painful or dangerous in real life. A football field represents, and in a fortunate person’s life substitutes for, a battlefield. There are opportunities there for physical prowess, bravery, and the camaraderie shared by people who fight together, but nobody dies. The bleachers are the home front: the spectators have the thrill of cheering on an army without the usual moral complications or danger to themselves from air raids.
In 1886, when a meeting was held to decide on a college color for Wabash, the most favored choice was heliotrope (for those who don’t know, heliotrope is a rather too precious shade of purple) until a student stood up and yelled, “Heliotrope hell! We want blood!” That is the origin of our beloved Wabash scarlet. In a similar vein, before this year’s “White Out Depauw” bell game, some students could be heard to say that after the game, our white sweatshirts would have turned red, soaked in the blood of Dannies. These students were right. That kind of thing does no harm to anybody. However, if the feminists we have discussed are consistent, they find Wabash students talking about the blood of Dannies about as acceptable as a member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation would find a politician talking about the Blood of the Lamb.
No one thinks that gender should not be talked about or studied. However, there are severe problems with the way it is usually talked about at Wabash. (The problem is undoubtedly as bad and probably worse everywhere else, but Wabash is my concern here.) Feminism’s desire to cross-examine traditional conceptions of gender is commendable, but it doesn’t adequately cross-examine itself. Students who are skeptical of gender studies have not been won over by the quality of the discussions that have been presented to convince them. Furthermore, they interpret the distrustful attitude toward masculinity as distrust of them as persons, contrary to Wabash’s great tradition of trusting students (whence comes this thing called the Gentleman’s Rule). I can’t blame them for either of those things. The conversation about gender at Wabash is still rough and lacking in many respects. It has not yet reached the point where we have any grounds for confidence that we will benefit students by prescribing it, as it is practiced now, for all.
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