In Celeste Davis’ discussion of why men aren’t going to college, there was a quote from someone arguing that the whole educational experience is designed for women. Girls are happy to sit there and listen as a teacher tells them what’s right or wrong; boys are too independent, too rebellious! They’re going to jump up, declare “Screw you! You’re wrong and I’m doing it my way!” and then off they go to do that.
The quote isn’t arguing the teacher is wrong (certainly teachers can be), it’s arguing that accepting the teacher as an authority to listen to and to obey is inherently unmanly. As I’ve written about before, this undead sexist cliche goes back at least to the early 1990s, and it’s bullshit. The further back we go in history, the stricter discipline gets, so why is the problem happening now (Celeste Davis’ piece offers some possible answers)? Indeed the entire educational system has been designed for boys and young men rather than women: college was all male for a long time and women getting advanced education used to be controversial.
The idea that women make the rules and manhood consists of defying them is an old one. Playboy columnist Asa Barber used to write about how in his boyhood the girls would try to tell him how to play and he’d defy them because he was a boy and boys do that, dammit! Yet it isn’t women who run society or dictate how it runs — the culture as we see it was largely designed by men. Not because they’re inherently superior or better rulers but because they’ve had the power and women have often paid a price for defying it. If women built society men wouldn’t have controlled their finances, their lives and denied them the vote for so long.
Likewise, Amy Otto at the Federalist argues that women used to control dating and mating but now men are in charge. As I put it at the link, “That would explain why a hundred years ago women could take as many partners as they wanted while men who slept around were tarred as “tramps” and treated like dirt. Oh, wait, history was nothing like that. A male-dominated patriarchal system has always set the standards: pushing women to marry early (still held up as the ideal by multiple conservatives), restricting their options if they didn’t marry, hand-waving rape cases away.”
If men are natural rebels, why is it the military is overwhelmingly — until recently, entirely — male? Why do so many men fill the ranks of middle management and salaryman in the corporate world, jobs that require they do as they’re told? A friend of mine in upper management says men are far more likely to talk tough and act like docile drones; women are much more likely to take a hard line because they have to fight to exert their authority.
If men are rebelling against teachers I suspect it’s more the fear of being too girly. If women are going to college, studying hard and learning from teachers, then some guys will do the opposite because (as Davis says), there’s nothing worse than being a girl. As Davis mentions in another article, for some guys “precarious manhood beliefs portray manhood, relative to womanhood, as a social status that is hard to earn, easy to lose, and proven via public action.” I discuss the challenge of dealing with this here. The Davis link has more thoughts and, I think, better ones.
It’s also possible that it reflects that for most men, women are the first lawgivers they meet — a mom, a sister, their granny, their nanny. Some men respect women for that; others see them as a tyranny that has to be smashed to be free.
For more on misogyny, sexism and the constricting nature of patriarchy, check out my Undead Sexist Cliches in paperback or ebook.
