Michael Kimmel Is at It Again

Suppose you follow the tortured treatment of gender politics on campus, and someone told you that a male “gender expert” funded by the MacArthur Foundation had just published a Time essay strikingly  hostile to men. Could you identify the author? Why yes—that would have to be Michael Kimmel, in this essay  arguing that fraternities should be banned from having parties—sororities should have the parties instead. Hostility to males is one of the sure-fire paths to a lucrative campus career, especially when approaching the MacArthur Foundation for funding.

Here is Cathy Young, discussing Kimmel  in an essay on this site a year ago: “When Kimmel talks about men and boys–at least ones unreconstructed by feminism–it is often in a tone that ranges from ironic condescension to scolding rebuke and outright antipathy….(His book Guyland) offers such a relentless catalogue of male deficiencies and iniquities, such a parade of misogynistic, entitled, videogame-and porn-obsessed jerks that the concern eventually looks a lot like defamation.” Yes, it looks that way to us too.

Author

  • John Leo

    John Leo is the editor of Minding the Campus, dedicated to chronicling imbalances within higher education and restoring intellectual pluralism to our American universities. His popular column, "On Society," ran in U.S.News & World Report for 17 years.

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One thought on “Michael Kimmel Is at It Again”

  1. Where did Kimmel get his claim about sororities being prohibited from serving alcohol at parties? I did see a discouragement:

    “College Panhellenic support of Alcohol Free Chapter Events (2001, 2009)
    NPC recommends that College Panhellenics support and encourage chapters to have alcohol-free events with student
    organizations as well as men’s fraternity chapters.” https://www.npcwomen.org/resources/pdf/College%20Panhellenic%20Policies%20and%20Best%20Practices.pdf

    But that is simply not a prohibition.

    Also, nowhere in his article does Kimmel mention the possibility of men getting sexually assaulted at these parties. One has to wonder how honest a person is when he writes about the perilous world of where boys become men, but doesn’t indicate that sexual harassment and sexual assault does happen to males in that world.

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