Someone conservative is stacking the borders bookshelves

I've heard my share of idiotic things from UCLA undergraduates. They've ranged from racist and ignorant to just plain moronic and thoughtless. Occasionally, they provoke an impulsive response (which I typically regret), but most frequently, I acknowledge them with an internal meditation on the millions of California young people who will never receive a degree from UCLA who are infinitely more brilliant, insightful and critical. In any case, one of my recurring favorites is typically uttered by a taller Caucasian gentlemen wearing Greek letters plastered across his chest and/or some sort of shirt displaying an obnoxious clichéd phrase that he undoubtedly thinks is irresistibly clever. My roommate's favorite example? "trust me, I'm a doctor." The statement I speak of comes seldom as a surprise and rarely from a source I can't anticipate. Infact, I've encountered it more from my colleagues in political science than from anyone else on campus, "women's studies, that's ridiculous, why isn't there a men's studies, that's prejudiced against men." And why wouldn't they think that? Afterall, I certainly didn't get anything from my degree in political science that taught me to think critically about the white male lens through which the field is examined.

Unfortunately, I'm far from making my point. There is nothing particularly provocative about an uncritical UCLA student or someone in their young adulthood making a unoriginal joke about the ever marginalized and unappreciated field of women's studies. Up until recently, I had safely assumed that the "educated" population accepted the idea of "men's studies" as just about as preposterous as a proposed University course on the white christian interpretation of U.S. history. About a week ago when I was shopping for some righteous feminist literature at my neighborhood Borders bookstore, while perusing in "women's studies" I glanced up to see what the third from the top shelf had to offer (no I could not see beyond it, and no I don't intend to make this a discussion of the way that stores such as Borders are designed and by and for who they are structured). At the highest level, all I could make out was a plaque labeling a category section change: Men's Studies.

No that wasn't a typo. The Borders in Westwood is now stocking books in Men's Studies, and judgement has been passed.

I was pretty young when the politically correct revolution changed the standard language labels of just about everything, but I still remember a mildly persuasive backlash indicating that the ideology that shaped the politically correct movement would someday come back to bite everyone in the ass. Enter Men's Studies, no doubt a political correction made by white men who couldn't stand the idea that there was a section in most major bookstores devoted to the study of women and no corresponding label for literature devoted to men. Even some of the most uncritical people on the planet can at least acknowledge that the evolution of women's studies, ethnic studies, LGBT studies, etc. emerged from challenges to the white male norm that comprised every other single field of study that existed in bookstores, universities and library catalogues. If you've ever sat through a lecture on anything from psychology to art history to music theory you might have noticed that the information and perspective is overwhelmingly dominated by men. Men write about men doing psychology, creating art and music and everything in between, and the margins remain reserved for the rest of us.

Instead of creating curriculums that incorporated women, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Latinos, Gays and Lesbians in both perspective and practice in all subjects, the world of academia (or the people who control it) decided it would be more appropriate to isolate these people/groups into their own programs of study. With this structure in place people have to actively choose to study non-white people and women, because god forbid the entire academic population learns about oppression, especially on accident. The other by-product of this over-simplified solution to underrepresentation is the argument of "reverse discrimination" a ludicrous notion put forth originally by opponents to affirmative action, that essentially demands protection of the privileged classes. Afterall, we musn't disrupt the balance of power in favor of white male heterosexuals, it just might be the impetus to apocalypse. In this case, the idea of Women's Studies, African-American Studies or departments otherwise concerned with people and projects not closely associated with power in this country, have obviously sparked concern among white male academics, who have apparently used all of their extra time, funding and resources to devise a plan to intervene in the world of critical theory and put a stop to the one-sided perspective of the underclassed.

The addition of Men's Studies to my local Borders Bookstore is not only a development that has occurred just in the last year, it is a dangerous and haunting indicator of the shifting ideology of the time and the waning power of the American progressive. I for one, am terrified. It's bad enough I was educated by a system controlled and constructed by a finite set of values and ideas that exist to reproduce power dynamics, economic hierarchies and dominant social norms, now I have to be concerned about challenges to the challenges of the status quo. Holy backlash batman, what are we going to do?

In an era when most people know nothing and the people in power seem to know even less, it is alarming to think about how young people of future generations are going to be equipped with the tools to even acknowledge growing social problems, let alone attempt to solve them. As the Men's Studies Section widens and examining the social movements of the sixties feels like the equivalent of studying ancient history, I wonder just how limited access to methods of change and mobilization will seem ten or twenty years from now. More importantly, I wonder how the voice of anyone who doesn't have White Anglo Saxon parents, a penis and a Harvard degree will be heard through the echos of evangelicalism, neo-conservatives and libertarian economics. Hey, but what do I know, anything I've written since I came out of the womb would be filed under Women's Studies, and clearly isn't relevant to the mainstream academic population anyway.