Wednesday, January 04, 2017

.... Can You Imagine a Class Just for MEN?

The University of Wisconsin-Madison is offering a workshop for male students to discuss issues of masculinity in American culture and their own lives. Wisconsin Republicans are unhappy about it. This comes on the heels of Wisconsin Republicans also being unhappy about a UW class on Whiteness. Clearly, we're moving out of the "college is about challenging young minds with uncomfortable ideas, not coddling them with safe spaces" phase of the GOP/academia cycle, and into the "it's outrageous for colleges to offer these ideas that I find outrageous" portion.

But I'm actually even more perplexed that this class is triggering the reaction. After all, isn't the ur-conservative retort to all these ethnic studies classes and "safe spaces" something like "can you imagine if someone proposed something like this for men/heterosexuals/whites"? And then Wisconsin goes and does exactly that, and the right still goes through the roof!

"Perplexed" is obviously the wrong word here, since that implies I thought there was any coherent ideology undergirding GOP objections, but it's still worth noting.

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