Toxic Masculinity

The University of Wisconsin Madison is sponsoring a new program called the Men's Project which "aims to explore masculinity and the problems accompanied by simplified definitions of it."

According to the University's website:

The UW Men’s Project is a six­-week program open only to men-identified students that kicks off with an overnight retreat where the group or groups will talk about what “masculinity” means to them.

“A key element of the program is intersectionality. There isn’t just one masculinity, there are many,” says Sam Johnson, a violence prevention specialist at University Health Services (UHS), one of the campus offices organizing the program. She explained that other components of one’s identity—including religion, sexual orientation, and race—all contribute to individual perceptions and experiences of masculinity.

The "introspection" through "questioning" and the project's goal of exposing participants to "different types of masculinity" is designed to deconstruct the "toxic masculinity" that Social Justice Warriors believe is part and parcel to the Patriarchy. This is not education but rather indoctrination into the social justice narrative. Young men ought to be warned.

“We know that men are underrepresented on campus when it comes to campus leadership roles and getting needed medical and mental health services,” Johnson says. “They’re also overrepresented in acts of violence and use of drugs and alcohol. With this program, we want to find out why this is and how we can change that culture campus-wide to encourage healthier expressions of masculinities.”

Sam Johnson is one of the organizers of this program and was a former coordinator of the "Sex Out Loud" tuition-funded club which probably holds the world record for most pictures of condoms on a Facebook page. Sam observes how men are underrepresented on campus and campus leadership roles. Well Sam, if an institution labeled femininity as toxic they would probably avoid it too. The fact of the matter is that from little on boys will get good grades if they behave like girls.

The program operates on a transformative model of social justice allyship. First, facilitators ask students to consider how the students’ opinions about masculinity affect their own perceptions every day. Second, they consider how those opinions affect the people around them. Finally, the program examines how those perceptions affect the whole campus community, and that’s where facilitators and the Men’s Project program coordinators from the UW Division of Student Life, UHS End Violence On Campus, and UW Housing hope to learn the most from the experience.

The program is somewhat similar to an existing course available to men in the Greek community at UW-Madison called "Greek Men for Violence Prevention.“ A two-credit course in the School of Social Work, that class has been available to qualifying students for over ten years.

The goal is pretty clear: deconstruct masculinity and get young men to accept and promote social justice causes. Notice also the correlation in the article between masculinity and violence. Blaming violence on masculinity is like blaming abortion on femininity.

In a previous post I created a glossary of words that Social Justice Warriors use. Social Justice words and catch phrases found in this article include intersectionality, individual perception, vulnerablity, gender-based, diverse, gender-based, and social justice allyship, Knowing the terminology will create valuable red-flags when SJW narrative pops up in a school, church, occupation, institution or program near you.