Michael Kimmel, famed for his seminal, man-hating opus, “Guyland,” has managed to drum up a suitcase full of cash so that he can fund the start-up of a center for men and “masculinities.”
Before I go on it must be noted that this is the absolute highlight of Kimmel’s life. After decades of floating redundant conferences (mostly on papers from grad students and even some undergraduates), as a part of a cadre of post middle-age, insulated academicians, Kimmel has finally convinced someone with a wallet to take him seriously enough to fund his attacks on men and masculinity.
True to his distorted understanding of “men,” his board of advisors for the Center includes such experts on human males as Gloria Steinem, Jane Fonda, Carol Gilligan and Eve Enslar.
Do you need a moment? Do you need a smelling salt?
Yes, the crew that doesn’t need men (unless they are marrying rich ones), women who need men “like a bicycle needs a fish,” is now set to advise a university on the study of said fish.
Kimmel is just giddy imagining the academic glory.
If you want a good read on just how funny this particular bit of feminist insanity really is, take a quick trip here. I promise you will laugh till you cry. And then you will cry some more.
As for the treatment I want to give this matter of the foxes governing the henhouse, I think a good bit can be revealed with a dissection of their press release. Plain text: Kimmel – italics: me.
STONY BROOK, NY, May 20, 2013 – Stony Brook University will receive a two-year $300,000 start-up grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation to establish a new Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities.
This means Stony Brook will get $150K each year, but the foundation might decide against funding the second year if anyone important actually figures out what Kimmel is up to.
Led by Michael Kimmel, PhD, a Distinguished Professor…
Let’s stop, shall we? “Distinguished” is not a title or any other designation of Kimmel’s academic credibility. It means nothing. It is a sales pitch, and a cheap one, likely written into the press release at Kimmel’s distinguished insistence.
…of Sociology…
Stop, again. What is a sociologist doing heading an interdisciplinary field? I am just asking, because, you know, someone should.
…at Stony Brook University and one of the leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity in the world today the Center will focus on the emerging and integral discipline of men and masculinities…
Excuse me? Emerging? That is news, directly from Kimmel himself. He sent me a snotty email three years ago after I made an inquiry of him and his fellow ideologues at the National Organization of Men Against Sexism, another group that addresses the issues of men as long as the feminists who hate them approve.
In his email, he seems to think that he has already made men’s studies all the rage:
“I should point out, though that the national Conference on Men and Masculinity includes a Men’s Studies Conference, which, together with the American Men’s Studies Association’s annual conference – both of which have been taking place for about two decades — provides ample evidence that a robust and healthy field of Masculinity Studies already exists and is well institutionalized in the U.S. and abroad.”
Well, I suppose a discipline could still be “emerging” after two decades, especially since all those conferences Kimmel is resting his laurels on were one in the same with the conferences mentioned at the start of this article; conferences that were held, not on the work of accomplished academicians, but on papers done by students in areas like queer studies and “black masculinities.”
In other words, they got together for a few drinks and slapped each other on the back for doing largely nothing, then, down the road, crowed about two decades of “Masculinity Studies” that existed nowhere but the scheming mind of Michael Kimmel.
…but an important component of gender studies. The Center will open in the fall of 2013.
Supplemented by additional funding from Stony Brook University…
That would be taxpayer money.
…and additional foundation and private support…
And what might these be? A State university would be required to reveal this,
…the grant will be used to establish the Center, as well as the first international conference on Men and Masculinities in 2015…
This is where Kimmel just plain lies. Miles Groth of Wagner College has already hosted two of these, in 2011 and 2012. Kimmel is breaking first ground on the study of men in the same way Columbus “discovered” America.
It will also fund the development of a new Master of Arts program in Masculinity Studies scheduled to begin in fall 2017 – the first of its kind in the world…
More bullshit. A program at University of South Australia will be the first in the Fall of 2014, offering a graduate certificate, an MA and then in a few years more the PhD. It will also study males without consulting Gloria Steinem and Jane Fonda, which is precisely why Michael Kimmel will not even acknowledge it exists.
…and enable the University to solidify long-term funding for the ongoing operations of the Center.
The degree program means tuition dollars for the University, which all they care about and what Kimmel has undoubtedly promised them.
Finally, it will enable Stony Brook to begin external fundraising and identify the areas and personnel…
This means hiring people that Kimmel wants hired and grant writers he will oversee that can best “facilitate the conversations.” This is jargon, which means getting professionals in psychobabble in on the act.
…between researchers and practitioners that are envisioned as central to the Center’s mission.
To begin, the Center will host a series of monthly seminars and two to three large forums per year, which will build and gather a community of academics and activists…
Now we see the critical phrase: “academics and activists“. This has been the collaboration of Gender Studies people that turned the university into a place to promote feminism. Activists on campuses? Well, what else can one do when you don’t have a legitimate interest in the scholarly pursuit of knowledge?
…in the local area.
That means New York City.
The forums called “Challenging Conversations” will focus on politically divisive issues, such as prostitution, sex trafficking, the pornography debate, the boy crisis in schools, and more, noted Kimmel.
Only the last item has anything to do with boys, men and masculinity. Even the “boy crisis” is a direct rip off of Warren Farrell, and is there for effect, not practice. All the rest is feminism; see next paragraph.
Members of the Center’s advisory board include Gloria Steinem, Martin Duberman, Jane Fonda, Eve Ensler, Carol Gilligan, James Gilligan, Frank Ochberg, Gov. Madeleine Kunin (Vermont), Catharine Stimpson and Hampden-Sydney College President Chris Howard.
“This emerging field is international and interdisciplinary,” said Professor Kimmel. “Much work on masculinities uses the prisms…
Prisms:This is his nod to the LGBT rainbow which is central to Women’s Studies, led almost entirely by radical lesbian feminists.
…of feminist theory, multiculturalism and queer theory…
All buzzwords for what has ruined academe.
…and discussions of differences among men (by race, class, sexuality, age, religion, region and the like)…
This is a sociological perspective entirely, not multidisciplinary. And it begs the question again, why is a sociologist heading a supposedly multidisciplinary endeavor?
…are just as salient as discussions of similarities and differences between women and men.”
But here he is slipping in his eagerness. He does not admit differences between women and men! Michael, what were you thinking? But thank you for the quote!
Kimmel envisions the Center as being an umbrella
Let’s make that a circus tent.
…for the research that is being done globally…
There is none being done outside western countries and the USA, which is still the center of feminism; Many European universities laugh at thiswhole feminist academic scene.
…as well as a place for dialogue with activists and practitioners…
Again, activism? Professionals in psychobabble?
…who are engaged in programs to engage men…
To engage men in what? More nonsense and rhetoric?
…all over the world.
“I intend it to be a place where that dialogue between researchers and practitioners, between academics and activists, will be the central defining feature,” he said. “It is a conversation that I find too rare on both sides of that divide: academics who know little about what is happening on the ground, and activists who think they are inventing the wheel each time they develop a new program.”
Activism! Activism! Nothing here about serious academic work!
Stony Brook University is also the home of the field’s most visible and prestigious scholarly journal, Men and Masculinities, for which Professor Kimmel is the founder and editor. The journal publishes four times per year with one special thematic edition. Academic conferences, scholarly journals, and collaborative research projects are proliferating in both social sciences and humanities, noted Kimmel, with eight scholarly journals in the field of Masculinity Studies, and most gender studies journals now welcoming work by and about men, including Signs, the flagship journal in Women’s Studies that offered a special issue on Masculinities in 2010.
The 2015 International Conference
The 2015 International Conference on Men and Masculinities will gather many of the world’s foremost researchers in their respective fields, as well as people engaged in policy-oriented initiatives and direct service projects all over the world.
Notice how he names no one? He cannot name anyone because he is not in contact with those who are not allied with feminists. What he has in mind is “advisers” who will attract crowds.
“The conference will do more than merely inaugurate the Center; it will establish it as the single most visible institutional arena for furthering this urgent dialogue,” said Professor Kimmel. “These conversations will produce new research projects, deepen programs already in existence, and suggest the sorts of collaborative work that can generate local, national and regional policies.”
Bullshit rhetoric and nothing more.
The conference is scheduled to take place at Stony Brook Manhattan and will be open to graduate students and personnel from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and United Nation (UN) agencies. The Center will partner with various UN-based organizations as well as national and global NGOs to provide scholarship opportunities for their personnel engaged in projects around the world.
This connection with political organizations is ominous–and what does it have to do with scholarly work?
Kimmel anticipates 400 attendees…
Mostly supporters and “stars.”
…from all over the world during the three-day conference. “It will be the first conference devoted specifically to the dialogue between researchers and practitioners, which will be reflected in the session organizations eschewing traditional formal paper delivery in favor of specific global dialogues…
Sitting around cheering, chatting, waving banners.
…about ‘What do we know?’ and ‘What do we need to know?’” he said.
No papers? No formal presentations? This is not an academic enterprise. Do I need to repeat that?
The conference will also inaugurate the Master of Arts program in Masculinity Studies, a free-standing program associated with the Department of Sociology and Women’s and Gender Studies at Stony Brook. The Center will welcome the first classes to the MA program in the fall of 2017. “The MA program will be an important ongoing activity of the Center – vitally tied to its mission of bringing together researchers and practitioners…
Training more activists.
…and also promoting the field,” said Professor Kimmel.
Kimmel earned his BA (sociology and philosophy) with distinction from Vassar College, an MA (sociology) from Brown University and a PhD (sociology) from the University of California at Berkeley. He has authored nearly 200 peer-reviewed scholarly articles and numerous books on gender and masculinities including Men’s Lives (2010), The Gendered Society (2011), Manhood: a Cultural History (2012), and Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (2008). He has co-edited The Handbook of Studies on Men and Masculinities (2005) and Men and Masculinities: a Social, Cultural and Historical Encyclopedia (2004) which was named “Best of Reference 2004” by the New York Public Library. Professor Kimmel’s current research, a comparative study of the extreme right, white supremacists and neo-Nazis in the United States, Germany and Scandinavia, will be published in a new book, Angry White Men, in late 2013.
