Is Education for Girlie-Men?

Katha Pollitt writes in this week’s edition of The Nation that the fear of female pollution continues—in this case, within the bastions of academia. While the five-year old in me thinks that neocon men are afraid that girls will give them cooties, I actually see this as part of a trend that I have written about repeatedly, documenting and railing as pieces of evidence surface.

In short, I continue to believe that there is a crisis of masculinity that underlies many of the reactionary responses to cultural and political change in this country. The latest analysis is offered by Pollitt:

The conservative spin on the education gender gap is that feminism has ruined school for boys. "Why would any self-respecting boy want to attend one of America's increasingly feminized universities?" asks George Gilder in National Review. "Most of these institutions have flounced through the last forty years fashioning a fluffy pink playpen of feminist studies and agitprop 'herstory,' taught amid a green goo of eco-motherism and anti-industrial phobia." Sounds like fun, but it doesn't sound much like West Texas A&M, Baylor, Loyola or the University of Alabama, where female students outnumber males in about the same proportion as they do at trendy Berkeley and Brown. Even Hillsdale College, the conservative academic mecca that became famous for rejecting federal funds rather than comply with government regulations against sex discrimination, has a student body that is 51 percent female. Other pundits--Michael Gurian, Kate O'Beirne, Christina Hoff Sommers--blame the culture of elementary school and high school: too many female teachers, too much sitting quietly, not enough sports and a feminist-friendly curriculum that forces boys to read--oh no!--books by women. Worse--books about women.

It is difficult to talk about “masculinity