In response to Ian Dempsey's 'Decline of Men'

It's hard for me not to respond in anger when I read pieces like Ian Dempsey's "The decline of men" editorial published in last week's Bulletin. During the time I've been at Gonzaga, innumerable articles in our school newspaper have frustrated me, but none so much as this one. Despite never having written to the Bulletin before, I feel now that I must; Dempsey has leveled decidedly shoddy criticism against one of the few institutional components of Gonzaga that I categorically hold dear—the Women's and Gender Studies Department.

To begin his piece, Dempsey asks "where the counterpoint to this movement is" — "this movement" being comprised of both the effort to bring "The Vagina Monologues" to campus and the WGST department itself. My answer to him is that the work done through The "Vagina Monologues" and WGST is the counterpoint. Gonzaga is a school in a country where women are more likely to be raped by a fellow service member while serving in the armed forces than killed in action, where they are systematically paid less than men, and where they die in 75 percent of intimate partner homicides. Such a climate unequivocally demands counteraction. Furthermore, Gonzaga has its own history of incidents and patterns of gendered inequalities, ranging from repeated complaints regarding the University's response to incidents of rape (or lack thereof) to decades of denial of funding more than a few hundred dollars to the WGST department. Things like The "Vagina Monologues"and WGST constitute bastions of security and support as well as spaces for discussion in a veritable flood of gender oppression—not the sort of "bro-blematic" "loss of male identity at Gonzaga" Dempsey attempts to make them out to be. To consider them as he does, as if they exist in a vacuum, can only be described as dangerously vapid and misrepresentative analysis.

(A quick note before moving on—feminism didn't suddenly reach its socio-political apex in 1970, as Dempsey seems to imply. Plenty of major movements toward women's liberation happened after 1970 — including the Congressional passage of the Equal Rights Act, the passage of Title IX, the implementation of the first law outlawing the rape of a wife by her husband, and the development of Ms. magazine. Dempsey's choosing 1970 as the ultimate feminist date seems as arbitrary as his assertion that the WGST department is solely defined by a "feminist bent towards affirmative action.")

At this point, the editorial moves into its crux. Dempsey attempts to propagate "the idea that men have lost their traditional place in society and are searching for an identity" by citing various statistics. He does touch on an undeniably problematic phenomenon (even if he touches on the same thing twice) — namely, the absence of fathers and male partners worldwide and domestically. I wholeheartedly agree with him in believing that such pandemic absence does no one any good. However, the rest of the statistics he cites seem to be either causes for celebration or manifestations of the same "complete annihilation of what it means to be male" that he purports to be against. Regarding the former, Dempsey laments that women "outnumbered men on American college campuses by over 2 million" in 2006 and "women's earnings have steadily increased by 10-15 percent yearly since the early '90s, while men's have stayed roughly the same." In light of both the culture of violence against women in the U.S. (of which violence in the military is merely one form of appearance) and the pay gap still afflicting the women of this country—women earn less than 77 cents to a man's dollar nationally—it seems to me that more women in college and increased wages for women is not a bad thing. Pitting women's achievements against men's by voiding them of the contexts in which they appear constitutes a drastic reduction of human reality to an abstract, mathematical flatness of the most abhorrent sort. What's more, Dempsey continues this thinking by considering drops in testosterone levels between 1987 and 2004 evidence of what he calls "bro-pression." Here he again flattens human beings down to numerical commensurability, now writing as if men are men solely by virtue of their hormone levels. This reductionism Dempsey commits throughout his piece is completely antithetical to his notably existentialist closing lines, in which he seeks "gender freedom that allows individuals to cultivate their uniquely human potentials." I must say that Dempsey and I are in search of the same thing—the freedom of all individuals to cultivate their humanity to its fullest is what we must always be working toward. I cannot, however, see how we will get there by reducing individuals of all genders to quantitative equivalence.