I don't usually blog stories from Instapundit because, seriously, who's going to see it first on the Secret Blog without having first seen it at Instapundit? Not even me, obviously.
But you should make it a point to read this story from insidehighered.com, trying to explain and propose responses to the recent decline of men on college campuses. It seems the problem is socially imposed pressure to perform hegemonic masculinity. The solution is more women's studies courses, so that men will feel free to be themselves rather than, well, men.
Oh, and be gay -- you know you want to.
How any man could resist that program is beyond me.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
11 comments:
Yeah, I chuckled at that too.
However, if true, I found it interesting that men find "It’s not cool to study, to read the book ... male students studying on the sly, telling their buddies they were spending the evening with their girlfriends and then hitting the books instead."
That is an interesting problem to try to address, even if I find it hugely unlikely that taking women's studies courses will be part of the solution.
There seems to be a bit of an interesting subtext developing here, which is that the wimmyn aren't all that secure or comfortable with the declining numbers of men. I know racism and sexism go together like coffee and cake, but somehow I have a hard time imagining a college with a soaring black enrollment holding seminars on the problem of where whitey has gone to.
As to more women's studies courses, under all the po-mo bafflegab, this sound suspiciouly like the wife who asks her husband why he needs to go golfing with his friends when he could have more fun going shopping with her.
If you read the piece carefully, down to the end, you'll find what I consider to be probably the main explanation of declining enrollment of men.
It's the same explanation for the declining participation of men in the overall work force:
Free riders.
I did read it carefully, to the end, and I have no idea who you might think the free riders are. The college educated men? The non-college educate men? The women in college? The Angry Studies instructors?
Peter Burnet wrote: "...the wimmyn aren't all that secure or comfortable with the declining numbers of men."
Yes, but only because of the missed opportunity to indoctrinate them all in feminine ways.
The men who figured out that, now that women can make a man's pay, they can live as comfortably off them as women used to live off them.
The participation in the workforce has been about equal -- 75% -- for some time now.
It's easy to see why the women's rate went up, but the fall in the men's rate needs explanations.
I don't have it by me, but I got a survey at work last week purporting to show that 80% of women say they work because they have to, not because they want to.
Can they? Everything I read indicates that women still expect to "marry up" in terms of earnings with the result that far more remain single.
t's easy to see why the women's rate went up, but the fall in the men's rate needs explanations.One will do: retirement.
(That number is the percentage of men older than 19 participating in the work force.)
Not my experience. My wife got RIFed a few years ago and took advantage of retraining to take some computer courses.
There were 2 streams offered: computer literacy or food service for people recently laid off.
The preponderance of those laid off was, if anything, male; but the proportion of men in the computer stream was 0, and very nearly 0 in the food service stream.
May not be your experience, but when I went looking for the 75% derivation, that was the reason given.
Social Security is apparently headed for Social Penury.
The only way that happens is through an increasing number of retirees.
Mr. Eagar;
That's not evidence for your thesis, only that the guys laid off didn't want to do computers or food service.
Post a Comment