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7. Not So Romantic for Men

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7. Not So Romantic for Men DENNIS S. GOUWS 7. NOT SO ROMANTIC FOR MEN Using Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe to Explore Evolving Notions of Chivalry and Their Impact on Twenty-First-Century Manhood THE NEED FOR A NEW MALE STUDIES The New Male Studies offer an alternative to conventional gender-based scholarship on boys and men.1 Unlike Men’s-Studies research, which is fundamentally informed by gender feminism, New-Male-Studies research focusses on boys’ and men’s lived experiences and shares its concern about gender discrimination against all people with equity feminism.2 The New Male Studies are embodied and male positive (male affirming): their approach to manhood, which results when one “configure[s] biological masculinity to meet the particular demands of a specific culture and environmental setting,” not only celebrates males’ experience of different manhood cultures and subcultures, but also critiques—and suggests strategies for overcoming—systemic inhibitors of masculine affirmation (Ashfield, 2011, p. 28; Gilmore, 1990). An acute attentiveness to how manhood is inscribed in texts, textual criticism, and pedagogy is central to their methodology. In much of Western culture and literature, gynocentric (women-centered) and misandric (male-hating) value judgments have adversely influenced boys’ and men’s lives. For example, pervasive stereotypes of manhood that rely on gynocentric and misandric assumptions about males infer that it is acceptable to regard them as little more than pleasers, placaters, providers, protectors, and progenitors; such stereotypes assume the male body is primarily an instrument of service rather than the dignified embodiment of a sentient boy or a man (Nathanson & Young, 2001, 2006, 2010). These stereotypes are central to a tradition of gynocentric chivalry that remains surprisingly influential in the twenty-first century, while the tradition of male-positive chivalry among men waned in the early twentieth century.3 Because of these value judgments, these stereotypes, and this tradition; boys and men consequently experience “male disposability,” a phrase coined by Warren Farrell (1993) to explain a culture’s tendency to “honor the process that educates men to sacrifice one another’s bodies for appreciation” not in their best interests (p. 76). In other words, rather than being encouraged to value themselves men are rewarded for internalizing their own misandric marginality (particularly in the discourse of gynocentric chivalry) and disposability. Similar misandric interpretations of manhood in educational environments, particularly in the service of pedagogies that imagine males are in crisis or in need of a cure, have J. M. Paraskeva & E. Janson (Eds.), Voicing the Silences of Social and Cognitive Justice, 167–178. © 2018 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. D. S. GOUWS caused males to experience serious achievement deficits (Tyre, 2008; Sommers, 2013). Such interpretations are possible—and are openly expressed—because too often gynocentrism in educational environments has manifested itself in systems of hegemonic gynarchy (essentially entrenched gynocentrism in praxis) whose administrators and educators actively undermine opportunities for male affirmation. My academic work environment is gynarchic; I have worked among people who are not only unwilling to support attempts at acknowledging male disadvantage, but who also actively oppose any expression of male experience that they feel challenges entrenched gynocentrism and its commonly practiced doctrine, gender feminism. Here are two recent examples of the adverse impact of hegemonic gynarchy on men in my work environment. First, about a month before this conference, I and the male- positive men’s group that I advise were invited by an administrator to participate in activities that included a violence-prevention educational panel discussion and the male-feminist White Ribbon Campaign, activities which she felt “aligned with the mission of our group.” Although I have reservations about the misandric White Ribbon Campaign, whose web page to which the administrator referred me seems to assume that all men are potential rapists and which completely ignores women- perpetrated rape of men; I thought this endeavor sounded worthwhile—according to Hoff (2012) more men than women are victims of intimate-partner violence, and I told her that the violence-prevention educational panel would provide a good forum for the men’s group to discuss how to prevent this kind of violence—however, on further discussion I discovered that this panel would be about violence against women, and money raised as part of the accompanying campaign on campus would be donated to local violence-against-women programs. I was unsure how this gynocentric agenda aligned with the mission of a male-positive men’s group but thanked her for the invitation and suggested that this event be made more inclusive— as a violence-prevention education panel ought to be—to acknowledge the fact that men are also victims of domestic violence; she then told me, “when we talk about sexual assault (which will happen during the panel), we are always clear to say that men too are victims of sexual assault, statistically not as frequently as women, but they too are victims.” The gynocentric hierarchy of values in the discourse had made itself apparent: when presented with data that indicate men suffer more intimate- partner violence than women, ignore those data and concentrate on sexual assault— which, pace this administrator, victimizes men, but not as much as women. Keep the primary focus on women and their experiences—and universalize those women’s experiences as the central concern of violence prevention. I also suggested that in addition to talking about violence against men perhaps we could donate some of the money to a men’s charity—thereby aligning the event with the male-positive mission of our men’s group. Doing so, I reasoned, would be an inclusive way to get all people aware that both men and women should care about violence against both men and women. Although the administrator seemed receptive to the points that I raised, we were not invited to be panelists for this event and were not included in the planned activities. Gynarchic power had deftly sublated men’s experiences 168.
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