You go girl!

CNN: Why Men Are In Trouble

So I read this CNN article and laughed, for many reasons.  “Why Men are in Trouble” by William J. Bennett.  While I recommend reading it (if anything, for a solid chuckle), here’s a quick synopsis, as defined by the story highlights:

•  William Bennett: Women have made huge strides in achievement
•  He says men have fallen behind, now accounting for less than half of college degrees
•  Men are more distant from families, many don't have jobs and lack maturity, he says
•  Bennett: We need to teach boys the things they need to thrive as men 

The article goes on the cite statistic after statistic that women have indeed made great strides as a gender.  The saying, “You go girl!” as apparently been adopted by all women, and now we should worry about men and their inability to perpetuate a society that is suffocatingly masculine.

Bennett focuses a significant portion of his argument on employment and marriage, on the “founding virtues – work, marriage, religion,” That women have seemingly taken over the working force, and are having babies willy-nilly without the involvement of the father.  The irony, to me, is that this is opinion seems so deeply rooted in capitalism and economics, as Foucault suggested.  Human capital is all we are in the eyes of society, right?  And now, the human capital is being swayed toward the supposedly feminine.  Women are taking jobs and salaries, and they’re adding new members into society that aren’t raised with the proper respect for the power of the penis.

My apologies if I don’t appear apologetic.  With all of there readings in class, I feel as though we’re back to square one – at least with this article.  Bennett works with two very defined categories – men and women.  There is no in between, only black and white.  Here is the real world, well, at least the world in which I reside, the grey matter is where most individuals fall.  Aren’t we all queer, really?  There is certainly some truth in Sedgwick's suggestion, that it only takes a thought, a “compulsion” to speak of ourselves as different to truly be different.

While I understand that, to make an effective social commentary, one must create these categories, to create the political unit, as Butler noted.  But to adhere to such an outdated, exclusive dichotomy suggests to me the very opposite of what Bennett is claiming.  We can’t have made so much progress if we feel we’re ought to focus on “teaching boys to be manly men.”  How about we teach our children to be good people?  To teach (and more importantly, demonstrate) what being an upstanding individual, a responsible citizen entails, not how to focus solely on gender-specific scripts that will inevitably hinder their enlightenment and progression as adults.

I’m not calling for some utopian ideal where gender doesn’t exist, though I may sound a touch bitter.  No, there just needs to be recognition of the many, many categories and identities that lie between, outside, and of course, within, “man” and “woman,” boy and girl.  I have an answer for Bennett, who laments the increasing complaint of most “girls” – where have all the good men gone?  They’re apparently busy working on finding their mid-20^th century “virtues.”

-terese