This is the first of a three-part review of Michael Kimmel’s new book.
I order a lot of books (which I then pass on or recycle dutifully), but I’ve awaited no book in 2008 more eagerly than Michael Kimmel’s brand new Guyland: The Perilous World where Boys Become Men. As anyone even remotely connected to the gender studies field knows, the last half-decade has seen an explosion of alarm over the “boy crisis”. Pundits and physicians, mostly on the political right, have written anxious and angry jeremiads about how, thanks to feminism and other innovations, our sons are ignored, stifled, shamed, and alienated. The astonishing rise in autism and ADHD diagnoses among boys, and the increasing demographic domination of women among the college-educated, are regularly cited as evidence that the system is failing our young men.
Of course, concern for young people is not a zero-sum game. Success and opportunities for young women has not come, and indeed never need come, at the expense of their brothers. Much of the “boy crisis” (or its counterpart, the risible notion of a “War Against Men” recently promoted in a lamentable bestseller) is manufactured as a vehicle to push a tired anti-feminist agenda. But the fact that the problem with boys is often oversold (in order to market books to anxious parents and indignant right-wingers) doesn’t mean that growing up male in American society today is particularly easy. Young men today must navigate through a confusing and contradictory series of messages about their identity, their purpose, and their relationship to others. There is a real problem, and those of us who care about young men cannot let our exasperation at the flagrant misdiagnosis of its cause distract us from working on a solution.
This is why Michael Kimmel’s new book is so welcome. Kimmel (professor of sociology at SUNY Stony Brook) is perhaps the leading American scholar on the subject of men and masculinity. Indeed, it would not be a stretch to say that the growing field of “Men and Masculinity Studies” owes more to Michael Kimmel than to anyone else. His indispensable primer, Manhood in America, is now in its second edition. (I use it in my men’s studies course.)
Guyland focuses in on young men in one crucial decade: the years between 16 and 26. For the book, Kimmel interviewed more than four hundred men who fell into that age range, from a wide variety of economic and cultural backgrounds. (He notes how easy it is for academics to focus their research on their own students, who tend to be predominantly middle and upper-middle class. Kimmel assiduously seeks out young men who aren’t the sort to be found in selective four-year colleges, as well as those who are.) His conclusions, as a result of these extensive interviews and his own decades of work on masculinity, are sweeping, profound, and immensely important.
Kimmel, blessedly, skewers those who suggest that the “boy crisis” is in some way a consequence of feminist advances in education and elsewhere.
The idea that feminist reforms have led to the decline of boyhood is both educationally unsound and politically unstable. It creates a false opposition between girls and boys, assuming that the educational reforms undertaken to enhance girls’ educational opportunities have actually hindered boys’ educational development. But these reforms…actually enable larger numbers of students to get a better education, boys as well as girls. Further, ‘gender stereotypes, particularly those related to education’, hurt both girls and boys, and so challenging those stereotypes and expressing less tolerance for school violence and bullying, and increased attention to violence at home, actually enables both girls and boys to feel safer at school. (Emphasis in the original.)
What then of the evidence that girls are starting to surpass boys in terms of academic achievement, not only in the humanities but increasingly in maths and science? Kimmel makes the case that this is a less a result of anti-boy prejudice and more a consequence of the disastrous attempt on the part of many young men to live up to what he calls the “Boy Code” (more on that later). Continue reading