Air Force Academy Offers 'Men and Masculinity' Class

Seems like a step forward . . . especially since the AF Academy is known for presenting and enforcing traditional masculinity roles and definitions among cadets. Unfortunately, but as one might expect, most of the students in the class are female, and the few males who sign up get a lot of shaming from peers.

The AF Academy has been the poster child for military abuse of women:

• "Air Force Inspector General Summary Report Concerning The Handling Of Sexual Assault Cases At The United States Air Force Academy" (pdf). 14 September 2004. Archived from the original on 13 May 2009. Retrieved 25 May 2009.
• "Rate of Rape at Academy Is Put at 12% in Survey". The New York Times. 28 August 2003. Retrieved 28 March 2005.
• "Air Force Ignored Academy Abuse". The New York Times. 23 September 2003. Retrieved 28 March 2005.
• Shanker, Thom (8 December 2004). "Commanders Are Faulted on Assaults at Academy". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 April 2010.

They are also known for promoting fundamentalist Christian views as the only acceptable beliefs:

• "Zealots at the Air Force Academy, editorial, ''New York Times,'' Jun. 11, 2005". Select.nytimes.com. 11 June 2005. Retrieved 2012-02-20.
• Air Force Sued over Religion, CBS News, Oct. 6, 2005". Cbsnews.com. 11 February 2009. Retrieved 2012-02-20.
• Elliot, Dan, "41% Of Non-Christian AF Cadets Cite Proselytizing", Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 29 October 2010.

On the bright side, the professor, Dr. Kilmartin, is a licensed clinical psychologist who is best known for his work in gender roles and preventing gender violence. His major scholarly work is The Masculine Self (link is the third ed., but there is a fourth ed., 2010), and The Pain Behind the Mask: Overcoming Masculine Depression (with John Lynch, 1999).

AF Academy Offers 'Men and Masculinity' Class

Sept 05, 2013
Colorado Springs Gazette

Behavioral sciences major Trevor Langford could have signed up for any of a number of electives this fall.

The junior Air Force Academy cadet opted to enroll in "Men and Masculinity," a new class that fulfills an elective requirement for his major.

The course, open to all cadets, aims to reduce the rate of sexual assaults at the school by encouraging students to think critically about gender constructs, resist peer pressure and laude peers who do the same.

Langford's friends have made him pay for the class choice ever since.

"They'll say, 'I'd validate that class on day one, so I don't need it,'" he said.

Or they'll ask him questions like "Are you not secure enough in your masculinity?" and "Do you need to learn how to be a man?"

Langford, an aspiring social worker, doesn't let the comments bother him.

"I don't judge people," he said. "I'll call them out on it, bring it to their attention that they're not right at all."

Changing the culture

Langford handles the course-inspired teasing exactly as his instructor, Christopher Kilmartin, wishes all cadets would.

A bit of verbal bravado can go a long way in changing the cultural climate of the academy, the military and society as a whole, Kilmartin, a psychology professor from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said during an Aug. 15 class session.

Kilmartin gave an example: On the golf course, it's not uncommon to hear men to chide each other to "hit the ball, Alice," or to blame a bad shot on getting the putter caught up their skirt, he said.

"I never let that go," Kilmartin told his students, most of whom are female. "A well-placed phrase indicating your disapproval can be very, very powerful. I'll say something like, 'Oh, I don't know. I think Michelle Wie could have gotten it a little closer.'"

It may be a small gesture, but it requires courage, an attribute that often is associated with masculinity, Kilmartin said.

His contention: Real men would speak up.

"A lot of men think courage means running into a burning building," he said. "But isn't it also courageous to say, 'I don't like the way you talk about women?' Or, 'I don't want to go to the strip club with you. I don't want that to be part of my life?' That's courageous."

That won't stop sexual assaults. But it can cause a ripple effect that slowly changes military culture to one that doesn't tolerate rape and sexual assault, crimes that are typically committed by men against women, Kilmartin said.

"The social construction of masculinity is anti-femininity," he told the class. "We learn from a very early age what women do, and for God's sake, don't do it. The worst insult you can give to a boy is that 'you run like, act like, look like, dance like, throw like a girl.' So when we tell little boys that being like a girl diminishes you, what kind of attitude are we building? We are teaching them to disrespect women.

"My job as an educator is to name the pressure" that exists for males to conform to unhealthy masculine stereotypes, Kilmartin continued. "If I can help you name the pressure for yourself, you can learn how to resist it when it conflicts with important life goals or hurts another person."

More reports, fewer assaults

Teaching at the academy is a temporary gig for Kilmartin, who is participating in the school's distinguished visiting professor program this academic year.

This fall, he's teaching two sections of "Men and Masculinity," as well as consulting with faculty and conducting research.

In the spring, he'll teach "Interpersonal Violence."

The author of popular gender study text "The Masculine Self,"Kilmartin has spent his career teaching similar courses at civilian universities, where most of his students are usually women.

More recently, he's taken his expertise to the military. Kilmartin has worked with the U.S. Naval Academy to revise its sexual assault and harassment prevention curriculum and wrote a script for an Army training film on the same topic.

His goal for the 10 short months he'll spend at the Air Force Academy: increase the reporting rate of sexual assaults -- a move he calls a "prevention strategy" since 90 percent of acquaintance sexual assaults are committed by serial offenders, he said.

Reducing the occurrence of sexual assaults will require those who would never dream of committing a sex assault doing their part to cultivate a healthy climate, Kilmartin said.

"With regards to disrespectful behavior, a lot of people think, 'I need to refrain from that,'" he said. "The message we want to send is, 'We need more from you than that.' The way I put it to cadets is, 'Is your goal to graduate from the academy with a 2.0 GPA and exit the service at the same rank you entered at?

"We want to increase the kind of attitude of respect for everybody that's a core value here, but maybe isn't always followed," he said. "Every college, university and service academy in the country has issues with sexual assault. We want to reduce that and amplify the healthy voices, which are the vast majority."

Though it's early in the semester, students such as Langford may have already started the ripple effect Kilmartin is hoping to create.

The more Langford talks about discussion topics from the class with his fellow cadets at lunch, the more positive responses he gets, the cadet said.

"A lot of them are like, 'Oh, man. I really wish I was in that class too,'" he said.

Noah Brand - Misandry Mirrors Misogyny, or There Is No Gender War

For those who have not been following the situation, there have been considerable changes at The Good Men Project in recent months. The latest of which is the appointment of Noah Brand, he who blog(s/ged) at No Seriously, What About The Menz?, as the new editor-in-chief of the Good Men Project.

He's been doing a fair bit of writing on the site, since that is what bloggers do, most of which I have found interesting, but this one post - There Is No Gender War - I thought merited additional thought/discussion.

In this piece, Brand argues against the notion of a gender war between the feminists and the men's rights activists (MRAs):

Feminists and MRAs are not pure and not equivalent, victory for one does not equal defeat for the other, and it certainly doesn’t map accurately to people’s real-life experiences of gender. I reject the entire silly model as a useless framing of gender roles in our society. It’s a lousy model with no predictive value and I’ll have no truck with it. A better model lies not in the middle, but outside the Manichean conflict entirely.

I think it's important to qualify his observation as partially true, but only for those not engaged in the "war." Those people who identify as Feminists (note the capital F) and those who identify as Men's Rights Activists (again, note the capitalization), are so thoroughly embedded in their perspective, very limited though it be, that they cannot fathom another perspective possibly holding any merit. They are fundamentalists, or extremists, or radicals - and they are a small but vocal element in either camp.

But his real point is more important - and more post-gender. He argues that we cannot keep buying into the zero-sum game of the gender war but, rather, we must come to accept that we will be liberated from denigrating and restrictive stereotypes and gender roles together or not all.

There’s a principle we discovered over at No Seriously, What About The Menz?, that we named Ozy’s Law. It is simply this: you cannot form a stereotype about either of the two major genders without simultaneously forming a concurrent stereotype about the other. Or, more simply: misandry mirrors misogyny.

Pick out whatever sexist stereotypes offend you, and you’ll find that every one of them has a corollary stereotype. Men always want sex; women never want sex. Men are slobs; women should do housework. Men are shallow and looks-obsessed; women are only valuable for their looks. Men are only valuable for their success and money; women are shallow gold-diggers. There is no end to these, no offensively wrong stereotype that doesn’t carry its offensively wrong twin.

Therefore, the entire asinine notion of gender liberation as a zero-sum game in which one gender must lose for the other to gain… simply doesn’t make sense. It cannot make sense. Men and women can only be liberated together, or not at all.

We cannot liberate men from the trap of the success myth without liberating women from the beauty myth. We cannot liberate women from being nothing but housewives without liberating men from being nothing but breadwinners. We cannot liberate everyone from repressive and outdated sexual roles if we’re only going to pick at the edges of the problem, trying to free this person’s penis or that person’s vagina. At this point in the game, we are either freeing everyone from repressive gender roles or we’re just fucking around.

Exactly - and it's way past time to stop fucking around.