Apparently, it's not only jocks and frat boys who contribute to America's rape culture - geeks and nerds do, too. This sad article is from Jezebel.

One addendum to this story, and others like it, needs to be made clear - we need to start asking college men about their unwanted sexual experiences. While most guys would be too ashamed to call it rape (stereotypes still dominate), a LOT of young men have sex against their will, either through intoxication of coercion. In one study (conducted at a University in Chile), 1 in 5 young men reported unwanted sexual experiences (USE) since the age of 14, another 9.4% reported USE prior to age 14 (Lehrer, Lehrer, and Koss, 2013).

In another study:

In a sample drawn from 12 U.S. colleges, 22.2 % of male participants reported some form of USE over their lifetime, with 8.3 % reporting severe USE (involving threats and/or force) (Tewksbury & Mustaine, 2001).

The 1 in 5 number seems to be accurate across nationalities. It's time we begin looking at this more closely in the U.S. media - the numbers of male victims are too similar to those of females to keep on ignoring this problem.

MIT and CalArts are the Latest Colleges to Expose the Rape Crisis

Anna Merlan
10/28/14 4:15pm


The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has released a new survey about sexual assault at the university, and it makes us feel all sorts of things: the now-familiar depression and rage, of course, but also, somewhere deep down, a tiny, unfamiliar tendril of tentative optimism.

The depressing and rage-inducing part is that about 17 percent of women and 5 percent of men said they had been sexually assaulted during their time at MIT. (The full survey can be found here. The school polled nearly 4,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The survey was sent to nearly 11,000, but only about 35 percent responded). And, like the other studies, this one also found that most of them didn't report those incidents to an authority figure. The study's authors write, "Close to two-thirds (63%) of respondents who indicated they had an unwanted sexual experience at MIT told someone else about the incident(s), but fewer than 5% reported the experience(s) to someone in an official capacity."

These numbers correspond pretty closely with a similar survey released by the University of Oregon earlier this month, as well as a Department of Justice study released in 2007. Despite how fervently rape apologists like George Will stick their fingers in their ears and try to yell it away, all the available evidence suggests that about one in five women are raped or sexually assaulted during their college years, and few of them want to report it. A full 72 percent of the people at MIT reporting they'd been sexually assaulted said they didn't report because they "did not think the incident(s) was serious enough."

The survey also pointed out some pretty encouraging campus attitudes about rape. A solid 83 percent of students understood that an incident can be rape or sexual assault even if the victim didn't verbally say "no." The majority also understood that rape doesn't happen "because people put themselves in bad situations," and nine out of 10 students agreed "most MIT students would respect someone who did something to prevent a sexual assault." Things seem to be progressing nicely in terms of generational awareness of how rape works: recall, if you will, that Bill Frezza is an MIT alum. He wrote that obnoxious, quickly-deleted Forbes piece stating that "drunk female guests" and their bewildering rape allegations could destroy the fraternity system. But there's still some confusion about consent: more than half of the respondents agreed with the statement, "Rape and sexual assault can happen unintentionally, especially if alcohol is involved."

"Sure, the data tells us things that we maybe didn't want to hear," Cynthia Barnhart, MIT's chancellor, told the New York Times. One of the most disturbing, she added, is that "there is confusion among some of our students about what constitutes sexual assault."

The MIT survey indicates how seriously the school is taking the problem, and the fact that they're willing to publicize the results says a lot about their commitment to transparency.

But it's also becoming increasingly clear that when schools won't address their sexual assault problem, students will do it for them: last week, around 150 students at CalArts, a small liberal arts school near Los Angeles, staged a mass-walkout to protest how the school had handled a rape allegation last year. According to Al Jazeera, who first reported the story, the student, a freshman, was raped in a bathroom by someone she'd briefly dated. The school, she alleges, asked a number of bizarre and insulting questions during a two-month investigation of the incident. From Al Jazeera:

[S]he said school administrators asked her questions about her drinking habits, how often she partied, the length of her dress, how oral rape was even possible, whether she climaxed and whether climaxing was an issue when she'd been with her alleged rapist before.

The perpetrator was ultimately suspended from school for one year. The victim has filed a federal title IX complaint against the school with the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights, alleging they mishandled her complaint.

Anna Knecht Schawrzer, a CalArts student who helped organize the walkout, says the student protesters are pushing for a new campus policy, one she hopes could become a model for other schools nationwide.

"I want CalArts to be known for a culture that promotes sexual respect," she says. "To make this possible, we as a community need to construct an architecture that facilitates accountability and health." They're recommending, among other things, a better and clearer campus sexual assault policy, a staff member solely devoted to addressing these issues, and better training for all staff and faculty on how to handle sexual assault reports.

MIT, meanwhile, has a lot of data, but seemingly hasn't quite figured out what to do with it. For now, they've set up an email account to take suggestions. The survey's authors write, at the very end of their report: "If you have ideas now about how MIT can reduce the incidence of unwanted sexual behavior on campus and improve the support the Institute offers when it does occur, please contact stop-assault@mit.edu."

MIT's Simmons Hall; Image via Graysky/Flickr

How Often Do Men Really Think About Sex? (Hint: Not as Often as You Think)

The old and patently false cliche is that men think about sex every 7 seconds. It turns out, according to a new study, that men (assuming 7 hrs of sleep when men are not thinking about anything) think about sex once every 54 minutes, or 19 times a day. For women it's once every 102 minutes, or 10 times a day.

The variation in response was wide:

Some people said they thought about sex only once per day, whereas the top respondent recorded 388 clicks, which is a sexual thought about every two minutes.

Of course, that is an average among 283 college students. There is little doubt that those numbers drop as we age, maybe more so for men.

How often do men really think about sex?

Tom Stafford
Neurohacks | 18 June 2014


(Getty Images)
Every seven seconds? Probably not. But rather than wonder about whether this is true, Tom Stafford asks how on earth you can actually prove it or not.
We've all been told that men think about you-know-what far too often – every seven seconds, by some accounts. Most of us have entertained this idea for long enough to be sceptical. However, rather than merely wonder about whether this is true, stop for a moment to consider how you could – or could not – prove it.

If we believe the stats, thinking about sex every seven seconds adds up to 514 times an hour. Or approximately 7,200 times during each waking day. Is that a lot? It sounds like a big number to me, I’d imagine it’s bigger than the number of thoughts I have about anything in a day. So, here’s an interesting question: how is it possible to count the number of mine, or anyone else’s thoughts (sexual or otherwise) over the course of a day?

The scientific attempt to measure thoughts is known to psychologists as "experience sampling". It involves interrupting people as they go about their daily lives and asking them to record the thoughts they are having right at that moment, in that place.

Terri Fisher and her research team at Ohio State University did this using 'clickers'. They gave these to 283 college students, divided into three groups, and asked them to press and record each time they thought about sex, or food, or sleep.


If you were asked to record every time you thought about sex during the day, how many times do you think you would admit to it? (Thinkstock)
Using this method they found that the average man in their study had 19 thoughts about sex a day. This was more than the women in their study – who had about 10 thoughts a day. However, the men also had more thoughts about food and sleep, suggesting perhaps that men are more prone to indulgent impulses in general. Or they are more likely to decide to count any vague feeling as a thought. Or some combination of both.

The interesting thing about the study was the large variation in number of thoughts. Some people said they thought about sex only once per day, whereas the top respondent recorded 388 clicks, which is a sexual thought about every two minutes.

However, the big confounding factor with this study is "ironic processes", more commonly known as the "white bear problem". If you want to have cruel fun with a child tell them to put their hand in their air and only put it down when they've stopped thinking about a white bear. Once you start thinking about something, trying to forget it just brings it back to mind.

This is exactly the circumstances the participants in Fisher's study found themselves in. They were given a clicker by the researchers and asked to record when they thought about sex (or food or sleep). Imagine them walking away from the psychology department, holding the clicker in their hand, trying hard not to think about sex all the time, yet also trying hard to remember to press the clicker every time they did think about it. My bet is that the poor man who clicked 388 times was as much a victim of the experimental design as he was of his impulses.

Always on my mind

Another approach, used by Wilhelm Hoffman and colleagues, involved issuing German adult volunteers with smartphones, which were set to notify them seven times a day at random intervals for a week. They were asked to record what featured in their most recent thoughts when they received the random alert, the idea being that putting the responsibility for remembering onto a device left participants' minds more free to wander.

The results aren't directly comparable to the Fisher study, as the most anyone could record thinking about sex was seven times a day. But what is clear is that people thought about it far less often than the seven-second myth suggests. They recorded a sexual thought in the last half hour on approximately 4% of occasions, which works out as about once per day, compared with 19 reported in the Fisher study.

The real shock from Hoffman's study is the relative unimportance of sex in the participants' thoughts. People said they thought more about food, sleep, personal hygiene, social contact, time off, and (until about 5pm) coffee. Watching TV, checking email and other forms of media use also won out over sex for the entire day. In fact, sex only became a predominant thought towards the end of the day (around midnight), and even then it was firmly in second place, behind sleep.


Sleep is the thing the average man thinks about most towards the end of the night, apparently (Getty Images)
Hoffman's method is also contaminated by a white bear effect, though, because participants knew at some point during the day they'd be asked to record what they had been thinking about. This could lead to overestimating some thoughts. Alternately, people may have felt embarrassed about admitting to having sexual thoughts throughout the day, and therefore underreported it.

So, although we can confidently dismiss the story that the average male thinks about sex every seven seconds, we can't know with much certainty what the true frequency actually is. Probably it varies wildly between people, and within the same person depending on their circumstances, and this is further confounded by the fact that any efforts to measure the number of someone's thoughts risks changing those thoughts.

There’s also the tricky issue that thoughts have no natural unit of measurement. Thoughts aren't like distances we can measure in centimetres, metres and kilometres. So what constitutes a thought, anyway? How big does it need to be to count? Have you had none, one or many while reading this? Plenty of things to think about!

If you have an everyday psychological phenomenon you'd like to see written about in this column please get in touch @tomstafford or ideas@idiolect.org.uk.

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Olga Khazan - There's No Such Thing as a Slut

In this interesting article from The Atlantic, Olga Khazan looks at a longitudinal study of college-aged women and their views on sexuality. What the researchers found is that there is a large disconnect between more affluent students and less affluent students on how the word "slut" is defined, with the wealthier students having a more semantic and liberal definition, while the poorer students had a more traditional definition.

The rich women tended to view casual sex as problematic only when it was done outside of steady relationships, and even then, only when it included vaginal intercourse. Meanwhile, frequent “hooking up,” which to them included kissing and oral sex, did not a slut make. “I think when people have sex with a lot of guys that aren’t their boyfriends, that’s really a slut,” as one put it.

The poorer women, by contrast, were unaware that “hooking up,” in the parlance of the rich women, excluded vaginal intercourse. They also tended to think all sex and hook-ups should occur primarily within a relationship.

The two classes of women also defined “sluttiness” differently, but neither definition had much to do with sexual behavior. The rich ones saw it as “trashiness,” or anything that implied an inability to dress and behave like an upper-middle-class person. 

The take home message is that for young women, slut shaming is less about sexual activity and more about socioeconomic class. In a related note, the researchers found that in the 5 years of the study, none of the girls made friendships across the economic divide. We are much of a class-segregated society than many people want to admit.

One of the important subtexts here is how much and how badly women "slut shame" each other. I suspect the reasons are many and varied, but it sure can't help that men and the mainstream culture do so as well.

There's No Such Thing as a Slut

A new longitudinal study examined how college students slut-shame—and found that the practice is as illogical as it is damaging.

Olga Khazan | May 28 2014  

Lara/Flickr

In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students. Like two Jane Goodalls in the jungle of American young adulthood, they did their observing in the students’ natural habitat.

The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college.

Their findings about the students’ academic success later formed the basis for Paying for the Party, their recent book about how the college experience bolsters inequality. They found that the women’s “trajectories were shaped not only by income ... but also by how much debt they carried, how much financial assistance they could expect from their parents, their social networks, and their financial prospects.”

But in the process, they began to notice that the women’s attitudes about sex were also influenced by their families’ incomes. On top of asking the students about GPAs and friend groups, the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.

“We were there on the floor when these dramas would emerge about slut-bashing,” Armstrong told me. “We saw working class girls walk out of their dorms to visit boys, and the privileged girls would say, ‘why are you wearing that?’"

As Armstrong and Hamilton write in a new study published in Social Psychology Quarterly, economic inequality drove many of the differences in the ways the women talked about appropriate sexual behavior.

All but five or six of the women practiced “slut-shaming,” or denigrating the other women for their loose sexual mores. But they conflated their accusations of “sluttiness” with other, unrelated personality traits, like meanness or unattractiveness. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure.

“If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term ‘slut’ is a sure fire way to do it,” Armstrong said. “It’s ‘she isn’t one of us, we don't like her and she's different.’”

Because most of the slut-shaming occurred in private, women were both targets and producers of it, and it was rare for the term “slut” to stick to any one woman. Instead, the other women were simply foils for each others’ supposed sexual virtue. One woman described her best friend like so:

“She just keeps going over there because she wants his attention because she likes him. That’s disgusting. That to me, if you want to talk about slutty, that to me is whoring yourself out.” “I think when people have sex with a lot of guys that aren’t their boyfriends, that’s really a slut."

For her analysis, Armstrong divided the cohort in two, with wealthier women in one group and the working-class ones in the other. Each group tended to band together, with the poorer half feeling excluded from Greek life and other high-status social activities. Several of the low-income students, for example, balked at the cost of the $50 "rush" t-shirt, Armstrong said.

The rich women tended to view casual sex as problematic only when it was done outside of steady relationships, and even then, only when it included vaginal intercourse. Meanwhile, frequent “hooking up,” which to them included kissing and oral sex, did not a slut make. “I think when people have sex with a lot of guys that aren’t their boyfriends, that’s really a slut,” as one put it.

The poorer women, by contrast, were unaware that “hooking up,” in the parlance of the rich women, excluded vaginal intercourse. They also tended to think all sex and hook-ups should occur primarily within a relationship.

The two classes of women also defined “sluttiness” differently, but neither definition had much to do with sexual behavior. The rich ones saw it as “trashiness,” or anything that implied an inability to dress and behave like an upper-middle-class person.

One woman, for example, “noted that it was acceptable for women to ‘have a short skirt on’ if ‘they’re being cool’ but ‘if they’re dancing really gross with a short skirt on, then like, oh slut.’”

The poorer women, meanwhile, would regard the richer ones as “slutty” for their seeming rudeness and proclivity for traveling in tight-knit herds. As one woman said, “Sorority girls are kind of whorish and unfriendly and very cliquey.”

Armstrong notes that midway through their college experience, none of the women had made any friendships across the income divide.

To Armstrong, it seemed like even though the wealthy and poor women were slut-shamed roughly equally in private, it was mostly only the poor women who faced public slut-shaming. And it only seemed to happen when the poorer women tried to make inroads with the richer ones.

“There was one instance where one of the [working class] women, Stacey, was watching the show The OC and made some comment about the sexual behavior of one of the characters of the show,” Armstrong told me. “And a rich woman, Chelsea, said something like, ‘Oh, you're such a slut yourself, you shouldn't be calling her out.’ It was supposed to be a joke, but it misfired and [Stacey] ran crying from the room.”

A series of emissaries were sent up and down the hall in an attempt to make amends, but the damage had been done. “None of the other women in the room chimed in to defend Stacey’s virtue,” Armstrong notes.

By Armstrong’s tally, more rich women than poor women took part in hook-ups throughout college. The poorer women seemed to notice that their wealthier dorm-mates were more sexual, but felt they couldn’t get away with being similarly libertine. The wealthier women, meanwhile, seemed unfazed by accusations of sluttiness if they came from their lower-status peers. (Think of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian, for whom public displays of sexuality were the rocket fuel on which they jetted to fame.)

“The high-status women would literally snub or look through the poorer women,” Armstrong said. “They would blow them off entirely. We spent a lot of time asking who would say hi to who; who would let the door slam in someone's face.”

According to Armstrong, one sorority member said, “I only see people who are Greek; I don't know who the other students are. They are like extras.”

The rampant slut-shaming, Armstrong found, was only a symptom of the women’s entrenched classism. But more importantly, the allegations of sluttiness had little to do with real-life behavior. The woman with the most sexual partners in the study, a rich girl named Rory, also had the most sterling reputation—largely because she was an expert at concealing her sexual history. “Rory was going to lie till the day she died. She would only have sex with guys who didn't know each other."

“Rory was going to lie till the day she died,” Armstrong said. “She would only have sex with guys who didn't know each other. She constantly misrepresented what she was doing and didn't tell people where she was going.”

One of the most striking things Armstrong learned was that, despite the pervasiveness of slut-shaming, there was no cogent definition of sluttiness, or of girls who were slutty, or even evidence that the supposedly slutty behavior had transpired. In the study, she notes that though “women were convinced that sluts exist” and worked to avoid the label, some of their descriptions of sluttiness were so imprecise (‘‘had sex with a guy in front of everybody”) that they seemed to be referring to some sort of apocrypha—“a mythical slut.”

“The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that,” she told me. “It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.”

Perhaps no recent example of slut-shaming is as horrifying as the shooting in Santa Barbara last week. Before killing seven people in his rampage, Elliot Rodger vowed to “slaughter every single spoiled, stuck-up blonde slut”— all while complaining that those very same “sluts” refused to sleep with him.

To Armstrong, the shooting highlighted that “slut” is simply a misogynistic catch-all, a verbal utility knife that young people use to control women and create hierarchies. There may be no real sluts, in other words, but there are real and devastating consequences to slut-shaming.

If you go to Northwestern University, you can take a course called Marriage 101. Why isn't something similar available at every college and university in the country? Or even every high school?

The First Lesson of Marriage 101: There Are No Soul Mates

A course at Northwestern University teaches students about what makes a healthy relationship.

Christine Gross-Loh | Feb 12 2014

Ellen/Flickr

Research shows that practically every dimension of life happiness is influenced by the quality of one’s marriage, while divorce is the second most stressful life event one can ever experience.

Yet nearly half of all married couples are likely to divorce, and many couples report feeling unhappy in their relationships. Instructors of Northwestern University’s Marriage 101 class want to change that. The goal of their course is to help students have more fulfilling love relationships during their lives. In Marriage 101 popular books such as Mating in Captivity and For Better: The Science of a Good Marriage are interspersed with meaty academic studies. Students attend one lecture a week and then meet in smaller breakout groups to discuss the weekly topics, which range from infidelity to addiction, childrearing to sexuality in long-term relationships.

At first glance this class may seem a tad too frivolous for a major research university. But the instructors say it’s not an easy A and its reputation as a meaningful, relevant, and enlightening course has grown steadily over the 14 years it’s been offered. In fact, teachers are forced to turn away eager prospective students every year. This spring, the enrollment will be capped at 100. The class is kept to a manageable size so that students can grapple at a deeply personal level with the material during their discussion sessions.

The Marriage 101 professors believe college is the perfect time for students to learn about relationships. “Developmentally, this is what the college years are all about: Students are thinking about who they are as people, how they love, who they love, and who they want as a partner,” says Alexandra Solomon, a professor and family therapist who will be teaching the course along with a team of four other faculty, all affiliated with Northwestern University’s Family Institute, and 11 teaching assistants. “We’re all really passionate about talking about what makes a healthy relationship.” The professors see the course—which requires journaling exercises, interviews with married couples, and several term papers—as a kind of inoculation against potential life trauma.

Historians tell us that marriage education in America began as a way to keep women’s sexuality in check. “Marriage education has been for hundreds of years aimed at women. It was considered their responsibility to keep the marriage going,” Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families and author of Marriage: A History, tells me. During the 1920s and 1930s, Coontz explains in her book, fears about sexual liberation and the future of marriage led eugenics proponents like Paul Popenoe to become enthusiastic about marriage counseling. “If we were going to promote a sound population, we would not have to get the right kind of people married, but we would have to keep them married,” Popenoe wrote. One of our more beloved cultural myths about marriage is that it should be easy.

College-level marriage courses became even more popular during the post-World War II period, when marriage rates were at an all-time high and women were encouraged to embrace a new role as happy homemakers. Marriage education during that time, Coontz explains, was similarly driven by a strong emphasis on stereotypical gender, race, and class ideas about how a marriage should ideally be conducted. “The received wisdom of the day was that the only way to have a happy marriage was for the woman to give up any aspirations that might threaten the man’s sense of superiority, to make his interests hers, and to never ask for help around the house.” In one case, cited in Rebecca Davis’s book More Perfect Unions, a young wife became convinced, after a series of sessions at Ohio State University’s marriage clinic, that her husband’s straying was a result of her failing to do her duty by taking care of her looks and keeping a proper home. And New York University’s College of Engineering presented “Good Wife Awards” to women who put their spouses first, providing the domestic support that allowed their husbands to concentrate on their studies.

There was another resurgence of interest in marriage education a decade ago when the George W. Bush administration undertook an initiative, with bipartisan Congressional support, to promote marriage. The Healthy Marriage Initiative was met with mixed reception; criticism was leveled at the lack of evidence that the proposed marriage-promotion strategies even worked, as well as the possibility that low-income women would feel pressured to remain in abusive or dysfunctional marriages. “We did not know if the existing scientific literature on predicting successful marriages would apply to poor families because it was mostly conducted on middle-class families,” Matthew Johnson, Director of the Marriage and Family Studies Laboratory at SUNY Buffalo, told Forbes in an interview. “Some in the scientific community were trying to point out that we did not know whether investing [large amounts of money] in marriage education for poor couples would work, but our voices were drowned out by those who felt that it was worth the gamble.”

Nowadays, when colleges and universities offer courses on the topic of marriage, rather than explicitly offering practical marriage advice, they often survey the institution of marriage from a historical point of view or look at larger sociological trends.

Today’s marriage education classes are most often aimed at high-school students, usually as part of a home economics or health class, where teens are taught how family structure affects child well-being, learn basic relationship and communication skills, or are required to carry around a sack filled with flour for a week so they can learn what is entailed in being responsible for a baby 24 hours a day. Other courses are taught at specifically religious colleges, or are meant for engaged couples, like Pre-Cana, a marriage prep course required of all couples desiring to marry in a Catholic church.

Northwestern’s Marriage 101 is unique among liberal arts universities in offering a course that is comprehensively and directly focused on the experiential, on self-exploration: on walking students through the actual practice of learning to love well.

While popular culture often depicts love as a matter of luck and meeting the right person, after which everything effortlessly falls into place, learning how to love another person well, Solomon explains, is anything but intuitive. Among the larger lessons students learn in this class are:

Self-understanding is the first step to having a good relationship

“The foundation of our course is based on correcting a misconception: that to make a marriage work, you have to find the right person. The fact is, you have to be the right person,” Solomon declares. “Our message is countercultural: Our focus is on whether you are the right person. Given that we’re dealing with 19-, 20-, 21-year olds, we think the best thing to do at this stage in the game, rather than look for the right partner, is do the work they need to understand who they are, where they are, where they came from, so they can then invite in a compatible suitable partner.”

To that end, students keep a journal, interview friends about their own weaknesses, and discuss what triggers their own reactions and behaviors in order to understand their own issues, hot buttons, and values. “Being blind to these causes people to experience problems as due to someone else—not to themselves,” Solomon explains. “We all have triggers, blind spots, growing edges, vulnerabilities. The best thing we can do is be aware of them, take responsibility for them, and learn how to work with them effectively.”

You can’t avoid marital conflict, but you can learn how to handle it better

The instructors teach that self-discovery is impossible without knowing where you came from. “Understanding your past and the family you grew up in helps you to understand who you are now and what you value,” Solomon says. To help students recognize what has shaped their views on love, she and her colleagues have students extensively interview their own parents about their own relationship. Many find this to be the most demanding and yet the most rewarding assignment of the course. Maddy Bloch, who took the course two years ago along with her boyfriend at the time, learned a lot when she interviewed her own parents about their own marriage, despite the fact that they are divorced. “I learned that in an intimate relationship each person holds a tremendous amount of power that you can easily turn on someone,” she says. “This is why relationships require a lot of mutual trust and vulnerability.” It seems a little unromantic to talk about skill building and communication skills. But it’s important.

Once you have a sound, objective sense of why you behave the way you do, you are better equipped to deal with conflicts—inevitable in any long-term relationship—with the appropriate tincture of self-awareness so that you avoid behaving in ways that make your partner defensive. The class instructors teach their students that blaming, oversimplifying, and seeing themselves as victims are all common traits of unhappy couples and failed marriages. They aim to teach students that rather than viewing conflicts from a zero-sum position, where one wins and one loses, they would benefit from a paradigm shift that allows them to see a couple as “two people standing shoulder to shoulder looking together at the problem.”

Thus, one of many concrete conflict-resolution skills that they teach is to frame statements as “X, Y, Z” statements, rather than finger pointing: When you did X, in situation Y, I felt Z. In other words, calmly telling my husband that when he left his clothes on the bathroom floor in the morning because he was late for a meeting, I felt resentful because I felt he didn’t notice that I was busy too, would lead to a better outcome than if I were to reactively lash out and accuse him of being a messy and careless slob. “‘You’ statements,” Solomon explains, “invite the other partner’s defensiveness, inviting them to put their walls up.” So too do words (tempting though they may sound in the moment) such as “always” or “never.”

A good marriage takes skill

There’s no doubt that the largest takeaway from the course is that fostering good relationships takes skills. “We’re a very romantic culture,” Solomon says, “and it seems a little unromantic to talk about skill building and communication skills. But it’s important.” One of our more beloved cultural myths about marriage is that it should be easy. The reality is that most of us don’t have adequate communication skills going into marriage. That’s why Marriage 101 students are required to interview another couple in addition to their own parents: a mentor couple (typically a local couple who has been married anywhere from several years to several decades). The professors hand out a list of more than 80 suggested questions and tell their students to think of the interview as a sort of lab experiment, a chance to observe the theoretical concepts they’ve been learning in a real-life context. During a 90-minute interview, a pair of students asks each couple questions such as what most attracted them to the other at the start of their relationship, which moments stand out as the best ones of their marriage, how they’ve weathered severe stresses, whether they ever thought about divorce, and what their sex life has been like over time. They watch the couple interact and engage in good couple skills: bringing a spouse a glass of water, for instance, as an unspoken gesture of caretaking. The interview is itself also a chance to observe a couple doing something that research shows is good for marriage: reminisce together as they look back on their relationship.

You and your partner need a similar worldview

Yet, despite how often we hear about the importance of good communication, even the best communication skills won’t help a couple that sees the world completely differently. One of the texts used in the course, Will Our Love Last? by Sam R. Hamburg, argues that people can be incredibly proficient communicators, yet never see eye to eye because they simply can’t understand how their partner can hold a position they see as untenable. “For people to be happy in their marriage they must be able to understand not just what their partner is saying, but the experience behind the words,” writes Hamburg. If partners are unable to do that, “they cannot understand what it’s like to be their partner—to understand their partner empathically—and the best communication in the world won’t help.”

The instructors teach students that once they learn to identify what is important to them, what values they hold, what they like to do on a daily basis, and what their sexual preferences are—in other words, once they know who they are—they will then be in a much stronger position to be able to recognize when they are with a partner who is compatible and shares their worldview.

Ben Eisenberg, who majored in learning and organizational change at Northwestern, took the course last year as a senior, right after the breakup of a long-term relationship. He found it enlightening as he looked back at his past and towards his future. “Pairing up with a partner is one of the biggest decisions you’ll make in life, more important than some of the other things you’ll learn in college,” he mused. Among other things, he learned to recognize that the more aligned you are on certain crucial dimensions—such as day-to-day compatibility, or whether you are on the same wavelength about larger issues—the better off you’ll be as a couple. He learned that all the communication skills in the world won’t help if you haven’t learned how to recognize and invite in a compatible partner. “How similarly you spend your day, your money, how you view the world, greatly affects that day-to-day happiness with your partner, more than whether you have initial attraction.”

The greatest lesson Eisenberg learned from Marriage 101? “I learned that the modern idea about love at first sight is a myth. Love is a lot of work, but it’s worth it if you put the work in.”

ESPN's Jameis Winston Coverage - College Athletes and Sexual Assault

It's refreshing to read that ESPN actually dealt with the Jameis Winston situation in terms of sexual assault (he was not charged with any crimes in the alleged sexual assault case, which is not say that he did not do it, only that the prosecutor did not have enough evidence to bring charges, let alone get a conviction).

The panel handled it as an actual news story, not as a sports story - and they did not get caught up in the "star worship" that so often flavors their coverage of athletes.

We will never know what happened that night, but we do know that college athletes sometimes have a sense of entitlement that, when fueled by alcohol, can result in the rapist's creed, "no means yes." Witness the following list: Morehouse State (2013), U of Michigan (2013), Fresno City College (2006), U of Montana (2012), UConn (2011/2013), Vanderbilt (2013), McGill University (2013), Santa Ana College (2009), Temple University (2012), Notre Dame (2010), Arizona State (2013), and West Virginia (2013), to name just a few.

All of the situations linked to above involved football players. In fact, while male student athletes account for only 3% of the college population, athletes are responsible for 1 in 3 sexual assaults.

Here are a few more stats to boil your blood (National Coalition Against Violent Athletes):

• A 3 year study shows that while male student-athletes comprise 3.3% of the population, they represent 19% of sexual assault perpetrators and 35% of domestic violence perpetrators. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• One in three college sexual assaults are committed by athletes. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• In the three years before 1998, an average of 1000 charges were brought against athletes each year. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• In 1995, while only 8.5% of the general population was charged with assault, 36.8% of athletes were charged with assault. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• The general population has a conviction rate of 80%. The conviction rate of an athlete is 38%. (Benedict/Crosset Study)
• A new incident of athlete crime emerges once every two days - that does NOT include crimes that were unreported in the media. (NCAVA)
• 84% of the public believes colleges should revoke the scholarship of a player convicted of a crime. (ESPN SportsZone Poll)
• 20% of college football recruits in the Top 25 Division I teams have criminal records.
• A college rapist will have raped seven times before being caught.

On college campuses, this is the reality of rape culture - it is perpetrated by and protective of athletes. In light of all this, it was nice to see ESPN handle the situation with the appropriate gravity.

For more background on this issue, see When sex meets NCAA athletics (Al Jazeera, Oct 2013), 5 Ways Sexual Assault Is Really About Entitlement (Salon, Oct 2013), 40 Years of College Football's Sexual-Assault Problem (Mother Jones, Dec 2013), and Shocking: College Rapists Almost Always Get Off the Hook (Alternet, Oct 2010).

ESPN Delivers Powerful Segment On Sexual Assault During Jameis Winston Coverage

By Travis Waldron on December 6, 2013

Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston - CREDIT: AP

Amid wall-to-wall coverage of the fact that the Florida state attorney’s office decided Thursday not to file sexual assault charges against Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston, ESPN found time to deliver a powerful panel discussion that dove into the other side of the case: the difficulties women face in coming forward after rapes and sexual assaults and the ways in which such cases are handled by investigators and other law enforcement officials.

The panel, anchored by ESPN’s David Lloyd, featured ESPN columnist and TV personality Jemele Hill and ESPN radio hosts Colin Cowherd and Paul Finebaum. Lloyd began the segment by reciting statistics about the rarity of false rape claims — between 2 and 10 percent of rape claims are false, he said, citing the National Sexual Violence Resource Center — and after a brief talk about Winston’s Heisman Trophy candidacy, the panel shifted entirely toward the topic of sexual assault. Hill, who wrote last week about the Winston case and a family friend who tried to sexually assault her when she was a child, talked openly about her case and the difficult, intrusive process that faces women when they report rapes and sexual assaults to authorities.

“That is sort of my concern here, that because you have a high-profile athlete, because of the way this case was handled and appears to be mishandled, that people will get a very inaccurate portrayal about what happens during this reporting process,” Hill said, adding that she faced “very intrusive questions” when she reported her case. Women, she said, “are almost re-victimized all over again” in these investigations, and this process “did a real disservice to the woman who was accusing Jameis Winston and certainly a disservice to Jameis Winston as well. I hope this will shed some light that this is still, despite all the awareness that has been made about sexual assault, is still a very difficult process for anyone coming forward with these types of very serious allegations.”

Lloyd then mentioned the Steubenville rape case, which was badly mishandled by authorities. Cowherd slammed the Florida state attorney for not appearing to understand the gravity of the case as he laughed through his afternoon press conference. Finebaum criticized the prosecutor for “grandstanding” and slammed Winston attorney Tim Jansen, whose own press conference was filled with plenty of veiled attacks on the accuser, for making “a mockery of the whole system, particularly with women.” Finebaum also blasted the Tallahassee Police Department’s mishandling of the case. All in all, it was a solid panel that dove into a side of the subject much of the media, including ESPN, has ignored in the weeks since news of the Winston investigation broke. Watch it here:



ESPN has faced deserved criticism for moving its hard-hitting news show Outside The Lines to ESPN2, where it commands a much smaller audience than it used to on ESPN, and the fact that it waited until SportsCenter had shifted to ESPN News to broadcast the Hill-Cowherd-Finebaum panel discussion is a little disappointing because it would have garnered a significantly larger audience on one of the two main networks. The mere presence of the panel, though, was a smart move from ESPN, which had covered every other aspect of the case down to the minute details, and Hill, a sharp sports commentator who also regularly weighs in on the bigger impact sports can have, was a perfect choice given her past writing and experience with the subject. Cowherd and Finebaum were strong too (and I had previously criticized Finebaum and ESPN for switching to Heisman talk even before the charges were officially announced).

While ESPN’s coverage mostly followed a basic formula: it featured two reporters on the ground in Tallahassee, analysis from legal expert Roger Cossack, and reactions from Winston’s camp, Florida State, and the accuser’s attorney. It spent significant time on the football implications too, which while seemingly trivial in light of a sexual assault case is to be expected given that ESPN has an interest in Jameis Winston the football player. ESPN will broadcast both the Heisman Trophy ceremony and the BCS National Championship game, both of which should include Winston. ABC, ESPN’s sister company under the Disney umbrella, will broadcast the ACC title game Saturday. And frankly, football coverage, not talk about sexual assault, is what people want when they turn on ESPN.

But as a news organization, ESPN also has a responsibility to provide not just what people want to hear but what is important to hear too. And I thought, given the dynamics of a breaking news day and the fact that it clearly wanted to focus its coverage on the specific details of the case, the ESPN News panel was a solid way of doing that. It could have been longer, it could have avoided the same trappings of Heisman talk, and it could have been in a more prominent broadcast position. But it was a strong segment, and I hope it leads to more coverage of an issue that remains a serious concern in college football and other sports on ESPN’s other news shows (like the aforementioned Outside The Lines) in the not-so-distant future.

The Suicide Rate Among College Age Men Is Four Times Greater Than Among Females

 

Suicide is a decidedly "male" problem in a lot of ways. On the whole, more women than men attempt suicide, but more men than women complete suicide. The problem is most obvious in young men and older men.

In this post at his Psychology Today blog Boys to Men (The science of masculinity and manhood), professor Miles Groth, Ph.D., of Warner College (one of the architects of the Male Studies movement, and editor of New Male Studies), examines the situation surrounding suicide among college-aged men.

If this were reversed, and women were 4x more likely to suicide than men, there would be national campaigns to raise awareness, Oprah would do a special, and President Obama would appoint a committee of morons to look into the issue. But it's only our young men - no worries, if weren't this it would be combat or some other cause.


I suspect there are a lot of areas where Dr. Groth and I diverge in our values and perspectives - but this one topic where we are on the same page. Something must be done about this crisis in our young men.

Young Men Who Commit Suicide

The Suicide Rate Among College Age Men Is Four Times Greater Than Among Females

Published on August 29, 2013 by Miles Groth, Ph.D. in Boys to Men

This week, a popular, successful young man beginning his senior year at a small liberal arts college in the Northeast left campus during one of the first days of the new semester after talking cheerfully with friends and participating in activities for new students. The next morning he was found dead, far away from home and campus. Next to him, the police told reporters, they found a suicide note. It was a "first" for the college, but it is a well-known phenomenon around the country.

Suicides among young males are four times more common than among young female, and they are occurring among ever younger males, some in their early teens. Little is understood about what motivates boys and young men to take their lives in such numbers. Of as great concern is another fact: little effort has been made to understand the trend.

The topic is at the top of the agenda of items for consideration at university and college centers for men. It now becomes another reason for stressing the need for such places on campuses. Among other topics at such centers, which are growing in number, are the relationship between fathers and sons, in particular the impact on young males of not having had a father during boyhood. Other common topics are body image and relationships with women -- and, perhaps most to the point here, their perception of how they are seen as males in contemporary culture.

The psychology of male suicide is not at all well understood, but since late adolescence is a time of identity consolidation, it is thought that being unable to answer the question "Who am I, really?" is a critical feature among college age men who consider suicide. It is also known that young males are more impulsive than females and often act without giving the consequences of their acts much thought. This might include taking a drastic decision to leave this world.

In more than 40 years of college-level teaching, I have observed thousands of young men change remarkably, especially during the last two college years. Generally on a somewhat later timetable that female peers, many undergo significant transformations only during the junior and senior years. They change in appearance, revise their persona, and perhaps for the first time make even a preliminary decision about what they want to study -- and this with only a year remaining. Their female peers have done this much earlier. Some find that they need a fifth year to finally put their intellectual, emotional, and even pre-vocational or pre-professional house in order.

Many other young men have still not decided what they want to do by the time they graduate. They return home to live with their parents -- more than ever before. By contrast, most college women know what they want to do by commencement and head into further study, if they have decided to continue with their education, into a career, or into a serious relationship that might lead to parenting children.

Just what prompts a young man to end his young life at a time when his prospects might be expected to be brightest is baffling -- unless we consider that they are facing a world that may seem not to have a place for them. And they are keenly aware of this. And they are hurt by it. Perhaps just having gotten over the fact that they are not especially welcome on college campuses -- something I have discussed in an earlier contribution -- they now face another world, the real world, that also has little good to say about men. They have all read in popular weeklies or on the internet about "the end of men" or heard the question "Are men necessary?"

As I have reported here before, the numbers of males attending college is at an all time low (about 37% nationally) in proportion to their female peers. This trend has been of concern to admissions officers for twenty years. The reasons are not clear, but they include a sense of not being welcome. But what about a young man who is among that group who matriculated, has found a place for himself on a university campus in a major he enjoys, has been engaged in campus life, and has done well academically? We must suppose that another factor is at work when he leaves in all behind on a warm summer day.

Perhaps the most vexing issue is that colleges and universities have not responded seriously to the fact -- not a guess, not a hunch -- the fact that the rate of young male suicides is so much greater than that of females during the college years. Why this has not become a topic for study and simple human concern is troubling.

I am convinced that men's centers on college campuses by their very presence raise awareness of the challenges young men face -- not only at institutions of higher learning but in contemporary culture as a whole. As a footnote to the incident mentioned at the beginning of this contribution, on hearing about that young man's suicide, an anonymous donor made a gift of $800 to the center to support its work in trying to understand, among other matters, why so many young men are ending their lives.

Here I bring issues of importance to discussion and leave it to others to advocate for policy change. In this case, I raise a question I believe is worth investigating:

Why are so many more young men taking their lives -- even young men with the special advantage of being able to afford to attend university -- and at just that moment when they have finally negotiated some of life's most demanding puzzles: Who am I? What do I want to do? Surely, this question deserves eveyone's thoughtful consideration.

It's nice to see students at the University of Arizona, here in Tucson, taking steps to redefine masculinity in an effort to reduce sexual violence. I'd really like to see similar programs in the local middle schools and high schools as well - if we can get to them when they are younger, we have a better chance of helping young men grow up to be good adult men.

UA Men's Project redefines masculinity, aims to raise awareness of rape culture

By SHELBY THOMAS 

Published May 1, 2013

Gabriela Diaz/Arizona Daily Wildcat The Men’s Project’s Devon Moule, an anthropology junior and one of the project’s founding interns, volunteers ...

With numerous on-campus programs committed to supporting various factions of the student body, the UA is now welcoming an internship program unique to the male population.

Only one semester old, The Men’s Project was developed through the Women’s Resource Center by Krista Millay, the program director of the WRC. Millay said she has always wanted to offer a space for men to talk about masculinity and about being a guy at the UA.

“If we want college men to engage critically, become their own people and be allies to other identities, then we need to create a space for them to go through that same journey, just like other students get,” Millay said. “Just like all student populations, our college men need some support that is geared toward them. The reality is that they need a space to grapple with issues: The good, the bad and the otherwise. I don’t think that masculinity normally gets that kind of airtime.”

The Men’s Project is run as an internship program that requires ten hours a week from its interns in exchange for three academic credits per semester, Millay said. These hours consist of a team business meeting as well as a critical discussion of current issues within pop culture. The interns also participate in separate projects. In the spring semester, they participated in the planning of Take Back the Night and the development of the curriculum for “The MENS Workshop,” a judicial sanction through the Dean of Student’s Office.

“We hope to develop this program further so that it is also a leadership class that students can take — not just because they have been sanctioned to it, but because they are interested in these topics and want a space to explore them further in a positive and supportive setting,” Millay said.

Michael Webb, a gender and women’s studies senior, is one of the founding interns of the Men’s Project, which he defines as a “program that questions aspects of college male culture and perceptions of masculinity.” Webb said specific questions the organization strives to answer and address include, “What kind of gender stereotypes are in place in our society? What boxes are we putting people in, in terms of the range of expression that we are able to embody in our day-to-day life?”

Webb’s passion for these topics made for a successful first semester for the internship, and now, Millay said she is confident that Alex Karaman, a graduate student working toward his Ph.D. in gender and women’s studies, will continue to improve The Men’s Project as the graduate assistant for the 2013 fall semester.

Karaman was a political science student at Cal State University at Long Beach when he took his first women’s studies course.

He said “the perspective that the course offered on relations between people … was so much more in line with how he had viewed the world,” and he quickly added gender and women’s studies as a second major as a result.

As an undergraduate student, Karaman said he was involved in campus politics and often addressed issues relating to college rape culture and sexual violence. He said when he saw there was an opportunity for this kind of work to take place on the UA campus, he jumped at it.

Although he has new ideas for the fall semester, Karaman said that there have already been great strides made to make The Men’s Project a very “legitimate and central part of the university structure.” He said his goal is to continue these successful services.

For example, Karaman said The Men’s Project will continue to hold “The Men’s Workshop” a few times a semester that will be mandatory for students who are repeat offenders of the Code of Conduct — more specifically, those who have broken rules that seem to indicate the influence of college male culture, such as “issues of violence” or “sexual assault.”

“Our purpose is largely to show that there are men that are actively engaged in trying to change this rape culture,” Karaman said. “I want programming to be made available that is proactive rather than reactive.”

Is the Sex-Obsessed Male Stereotype True?

In a recent post at his Insight Is 20/20 blog hosted by Psychology Today, Seth Meyers took a look at some research about the male obsession with sex. In the study, young men were much more likely to have sexual thoughts about opposite sex friends as were young women.

As Meyers points out, however, and crucially, the sample in the study was undergraduate college students - 18-22 year-old men and women. Short of steroid use, there will never again be a time in a man's life where his testosterone levels are higher than they are at 18-22 years of age. High testosterone = thoughts about sex. If he has attractive female friends, he may well have sexual thoughts about them, even though he may never act on them.

Meyers also points out that there is peer pressure in college to be the Big Man on Campus and that part of that traditional gender role (stereotype) is the expectation that he will have as much sex as possible - a [foolish] measure of his masculinity. Add alcohol and binge drinking to the mix (which Meyers doesn't address) and you get the cliche you are looking for - a young man driven by hormones, peer pressure, masculinity norms, and fueled by weekend alcohol binges.

Thankfully, most young men are not caught up in this game (or at least fewer are now than was the case 20 or 30 years ago).

Big Man On Campus: The Sex-Obsessed Male Stereotype Is True?

The notion of men as sex-obsessed bodes poorly for male-female friendships.

Published on February 13, 2013 by Seth Meyers, Psy.D. in Insight Is 20/20

You think the theme of When Harry Met Sally is outdated, even archaic, in the modern times of 2013? Think again. Recent research from Breske-Rechek and colleagues (2012) suggests that, even when heterosexual men and women try to be ‘just friends,’ there is often an ulterior motive that lurks underneath the platonic surface.

The study included 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends, and the overall results show large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. (The study’s other findings – for example, that men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them, which betrayed the women’s true lack of interest – will not be the focus of this article.) What strikes me about this study is that it seems to regurgitate all those notions of the sex-obsessed male caricature.

I came upon this research when preparing for a seminar, and the findings that men and women have different motivations in friendship surprised me at first. The research brought me back to all the awful gender stereotypes about the differences between men and women, stereotypes I have wanted to believe have fallen by the wayside as society has become more open-minded and progressive. Apparently, I was a fool to believe that men’s and women’s gender roles have become less rigid when it comes to sex. In my clinical work, I focus on the similarities between men and women, rather than dissecting the differences because I believe that men and women are far more similar than dissimilar. What’s more, I believe it makes more sense for men and women to focus on what is shared between men and women because this approach can benefit their relationships. After all, in marriage, a man and a woman's relationship will be most successful if they each see each other as an ally, as opposed to someone another other team - or worse, world (John Gray, anyone?).

Much of the research on sex and gender differences shows a significant difference in the way men and women think about and engage in sexual experiences. For example, research has historically shown that men have a higher sex drive than women (Baumeister, Catanese, Vohs, 2001). Similarly, Fisher (2012) found that men had an average of 19 sexual thoughts per day, while women had only 10 sexual thoughts per day.

As I read through the details of Breske-Rechek’s study on male-female friendships more closely, I learned that the sample of male and female subjects in the study were pulled from a university, which means that these subjects were young (or “emerging,” as the authors label it) adults. Factoring the age into the equation, it really isn’t that surprising that men think about sex with their female friends more because this is the age when men’s behavior is largely driven by hormones and image consciousness. Aside from the obvious hormonal differences that may impact sexual interests during the college years, there are also psychological factors at work: University is a place where a man may feel more pressure by peers to live up to some ideal of the Big Man on Campus who can always 'get the girl.' In college, a young man’s interest in sex with a female friend may not even be so true to his actual feelings, but rather may reflect his engagement in behaviors that serve to boost his social status and his own sense of masculinity.

Though the reasons behind the sex differences in male-female friendships in college are not exactly clear, it is fairly clear that the research bodes poorly for the purity of plain ol' friendships between young men and women. While I don’t see such grand differences in my clinical work with middle age adults and believe that such differences diminish over the life span, I can understand the study’s assertion that gender differences in the college years are alive and well – no matter how hard we try to tell ourselves that sexual stereotypes aren’t valid in reality.

It’s unfortunate that sex plays a recurring role in the backdrop of male-female friendships because men and women could seriously benefit from the ability to forge more pure friendships. Friendship is supposed to be about mutual support and caring, not ulterior motives and sexual preoccupation. Part of what allows us to be so close to a good friend is the fact that we can trust that our friend will never take advantage of us when we’re vulnerable. It's during such vulnerable periods that the lines of friendship can be blurred and two people can find themselves in engaging sexual behaviors out of loneliness or confusion. So much for the safety of friendship, right?

As far as we have come as a society and as much as therapists might like to tell themselves otherwise, sexual differences between men and women continue to exist and play a role in how they interact with each other. Perhaps the more each sex can own and talk about such differences with each other, the less those differences will contaminate their friendships.

References:

• Baumeister, Catanese, and Vohs. (2001). Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive?  Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5 (3) 242-273.
• Breske-Rechek et al. (2012). Benefit or Burden? Attraction in Cross-Sex Friendship. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 29(5) 569–596.
• Fisher, T. (2012, Jan). The Journal of Sex Research.

This is a cool article on allowing - even celebrating - the boyness of our boys rather than medicating it away with drugs or squashing it by prohibiting rough and tumble play. And of course, it comes from Canada not from the U.S.

As a 45-year-old man, I can't imagine what it must be like to grow up male in a culture that despises masculinity. There were hints of that when I was young - on shows like Donahue or shows like Three's Company - but the major cultural icons were "manly men" - Joe Namath, Burt Reynolds, Clint Eastwood, and even John Wayne still held a place as an image of ideal masculinity.

Young men do not have healthy male role models now (not that the guys I mentioned were good role models, but they represented an appreciation for masculinity in the culture).

If you have sons now, who would you want them to look up to (besides you) in this culture?

Celebrate boys’ boyness – and work with it

MARGARET WENTE

The Globe and Mail

Last updated Sunday, Nov. 18 2012

They long to be part of something bigger than themselves, but a lot of them aren’t finding it (Anthony Jenkins /The Globe and Mail)

Everyone knows the girls are clobbering the boys in school. They get higher marks and graduate at higher rates. Women have stormed the gates of medicine and law. They’ve all but taken over pharmacy and veterinary work. They are focused, purposeful and diligent. Their brothers, meanwhile, are in the basement playing video games.

How lopsided have things become? In the most prestigious programs at some of our leading universities, the gender ratio has reached 70:30. Men still dominate the hard sciences and maths, but, on the rest of the campus, they seem to be headed toward extinction.

Whatever it is that boys need to achieve success, a lot of them aren’t getting it. But what do they need? I sat down with several people who think about this question every day – Jim Power, the principal of Upper Canada College; his colleagues Scott Cowie and Mary Gauthier; and Brad Adams, executive director of the International Boys’ Schools Coalition.

“Part of the boys’ crisis is that the culture doesn’t like them,” Mr. Adams says. Our culture is deeply uncertain about the value of masculinity, and even less sure about how to preserve and protect its positive elements while also encouraging boys to adopt more fluid gender roles.

And despite the new gender fluidity, the differences between what boys need and what girls need are often vast. One example: In order to do well, it’s much more important for a boy to have a good relationship with the teacher. Another: Boys will only stay engaged as long as the work interests them; they’re much quicker to tune out.

Boys’ existential issues are different from girls’. For a boy, the two most important life questions are: Will I find work that’s significant? And will I be worthy of my parents? When boys themselves are asked what they need, they say: I need purpose. I need to make a difference. I need to know I measure up. I need challenge. Above all, I need a meaningful vocation.

No wonder so many boys are so miserable. The modern world of extended years in school and delayed adulthood cuts them off from what they need most. As Adam Cox, a clinical psychologist who interviewed hundreds of boys across the English-speaking world, writes: “The primary missing ingredient in [their] lives – the opportunity that separates them from a sense of personal accomplishment, maturity, and resilience – is purposeful work.”

Boys long to be part of something bigger than themselves. And the bigger and more challenging the task, the happier they are. “If you tell 10 boys you need volunteers to go downtown and work all night on a big, dirty, tough job, and you still expect them to show up at school the next day, they’ll all jump up and volunteer,” says Ms. Gauthier.

Boys also need to imagine themselves in heroic situations. When girls are asked about Vimy Ridge, they say, “Whew, it must have been horrific.” When boys are asked, they imagine what they would have done if they’d been there. “Our most powerful assembly is on Remembrance Day,” says Mr. Power. “Every boy is thinking to himself: How would I have measured up?”

Boys love rituals, trophies and tradition. Those also make them feel part of something bigger than themselves.

But, in the modern world, boys are often treated as a problem. The dominant narrative around difficult boys – at least in the public school system – is that they’re unteachable, unreachable, disruptive and threatening. Many commentators – men as well as women – blame male culture itself for the problems with boys. In their view, what we need to do is destroy the death star of masculinity and all the evil that goes with it. What we need to do is put boys in touch with their emotions and teach them to behave more like girls.

This argument might make some sense – if you’re someone who believes that masculinity is nothing but a social construct. But people who care about real boys know that’s not true. They know you have to celebrate boys’ boyness – and work with it. Many boys’ schools are trying to do just that.

Several public school systems have launched all-boys’ schools for failing boys. In New York, the Eagle Academy for Young Men is achieving impressive results for minority boys in a tough neighbourhood. These schools demand a lot. Their ethos is: We’ll help you succeed, but we’ll be tough on you, and you must claim responsibility. (By contrast, the attitude of Ontario’s public schools toward difficult boys is: We’ll let you pass if you leave us alone.)

If boys are failing schools and schools are failing boys, it’s really not too hard to see some of the reasons why. They really are fish out of water. Before the Industrial Revolution, boys spent their time with fathers and uncles, often engaged in strenuous physical activity. Now they spend their time in the world of women, sitting behind desks. If schools threw out the desks, they’d probably be a lot happier.

But schools can’t give them everything they need. Boys also need the company of men – men who will guide, instruct, esteem, respect and understand them. When asked about the happiest experience of their lives, boys often say it was the time they made something with their fathers. Their mothers matter, too – but, sometimes, there’s no substitute for Dad.

Overlapping Gender Roles in College Students

In an article misleadingly entitled "Girly men are the new alpha males," Jake Adler writes that young men are not so confined by the traditional stereotypes of masculinity as were previous generations.

Part of what makes this interesting to me is that it does not come from a newspaper at the University of Washington (Seattle), the University of Colorado (Boulder), Reed College (Portland), or some small liberal arts school in the Northeast - no, it comes from Arizona State University in Tempe (a suburb of Phoenix).

Of the three state schools in Arizona, ASU is the least liberal (NAU and U of A are both more liberal). It may seem a small thing, but it's good to see more progressive ideas on masculinity coming from a school I would generally associate with a frat boy mentality.

It's a little annoying that the author still refers to art, cooking, and dancing as effeminate activities (and also that he does not use the serial comma), but I'll take small steps in the right direction for now.

Here is the latter part of the article:

The line between genders has started to blur, thanks not only to the media, but increasing male tolerance for the social equality of women, alternative lifestyles and LGBTQA peoples.

For decades, women have filled the shoes of doctors, lawyers and CEOs, and men have had to come to terms with the fact that they’re not the only ones who can hold high-ranking positions in the workforce or community.

This might have been alarming to some men initially, scared for the sanctity of their manhood, but lately, the strides taken by women have opened up new territory for men to express themselves as they really are, unrestrained by strict gender roles.

In other words, when women shattered their social shackles, they began to erode the bonds arresting men as well.

Today’s culture encourages self-expression and individuality, and as women increasingly break down the doors marked, “Boys Only,” men have begun to feel a little more comfortable entering the ladies’ room, so to speak. The image of the man’s man has certainly changed.

Hyper-masculine figures in the media such as rugged actors John Wayne and Sylvester Stallone and director Clint Eastwood and have been replaced by svelte actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Orlando Bloom and James Franco.

Television shows like “Glee” consistently challenge older norms of masculinity by featuring straight male characters who love to dance and sing their hearts out and show off their sensitive side.

Our culture has begun to tell men that it’s OK to express themselves, and frankly, to have emotions. This trend can easily be seen all over campus: Baggy T-shirts and basketball shorts have been exchanged for skinny jeans and form-fitting deep-V-necks.

Interests that have primarily been associated with masculinity, such as sports and cars, have made way for more effeminate activities, such as art, cooking and dancing.

As gender roles for men and women begin to overlap, the difference between the two sexes becomes indistinguishable.

Confidence is boosted and a weight is lifted when people are free to do as their heart guides them—regardless of sex and free of social norms.

We’re being pushed towards a more harmonized society. Harper Lee said it best in “To Kill a Mockingbird”: “I think there’s just one kind of folks. Folks.”