Michael Kimmel on "Guyland" (outside academic lecture)

Michael Kimmel is a gender scholar of men and masculinity.  He is a sociologist.  And because he is a sociologist, I think it's fair to think about what he says with a narrative frame of mind.  What he looks at are the stories of society; his research attempts to answer the question WHY ARE WE THE WAY WE ARE and in that sense he is very much a weaver of narratives.

He spoke at the Stanford Humanities Center on May 15 to discuss his book "Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men".  He told us how his book had been optioned by Dreamworks.  He had said to Dreamworks: "You know this is non-fiction, right?"  And Dreamworks had fired back: "This is Hollywood.  We'll find a story."  Kimmel imagined them turning his book into a Judd Apatow comedy, in which much slacker-frivolity ensues until one man steps up and becomes, well, a man.  As his talk went on it became more and more apparent that his findings very well could lay the groundwork for a modern male bildungsroman.

So here's his basic idea.  Guyland is a recently emerged stage of human development, covering the age bracket between adolescence and adulthood -- the 16 to 26 group.  Kimmel's aim is to map this new American generation which, he also argues, is gendered.  He paints a picture of children growing up under the weird and stifling wings of intense helicopter parents who make it so that these kids are simultaneously less resilient and more risk-averse.  And then these kids go off to college, which is -- today -- by and large a place where adults have withdrawn from their social lives.  As college students, we are free to be social in the ways that we want to be social.  What this means is that when boys get to college, now that they've been overparented for so many years, they want to prove their masculinity.  He calls this the Peter Panic Syndrome.  College becomes a place where 18 year olds are trying to prove their masculinity to 19 year olds.  Whereas in other cultures, adult men dictate the terms of initiation in which boys become men, and plan it, and wait on the other side for the boys to emerge fully formed, in America, college kids face a vacuum of grown-ups.  Kimmel doesn't blame the boys.  Kimmel blames society, for not being there for these young men.

At this point in the talk Kimmel began to discuss the idea of gender and how it plays out in the relationship between men and women.  Essentially, gender is invisible to men.  When we talk about gender, what we talk about is women.  This is how privilege works.  Privilege is invisible to those who have it.  The quality of being non-white is invisible to white people.  To make gender (and race and class and everything else having to do with privilege) visible amounts to making privilege visible.

Finally Kimmel talked about how this sense of privilege and inequality plays out in college life.  Although college appears to be a place in which men and women are equal and allowed to be progressive, he cites Greek life as a world that directly counteracts any kind of equality.  Guyland, he says, presents false choices to women, who can either conform to the desires of frat bros everywhere and be a babe, or not conform and be a bitch.  Much of his research focused on the ritual activities of fraternities and sororities, and he found that they promoted a sociological structure that wildly encourages men to conduct themselves according to the ideology of masculinity, which hasn't changed for centuries (no sissy stuff; power is important; be reliable in a crisis; live on the edge), and that also encourages women to live in relation to this oppressive paradigm.  Someone in the audience took issue with his almost exclusive focus on Greek life, arguing that not all college students behave like that or espouse those values, and that even within Greek life there are individuals who don't give themselves over to those extreme images of masculinity.  But Kimmel persuasively retorted that although not everyone is involved in Greek life, Greek life represents a kind of norm by which all other lifestyles define themselves.  In order to understand the people who don't submit to the Greek notion of gender, one must first understand the Greek notion of gender.

Narrative is, I think, all over this topic.  Kimmel wove narratives in -- stories of hazing rituals, stories of how "adolescence" was coined, stories of affirmative action and men's flawed sense of entitlement.  But he also pointed to a larger generational narrative, one that I think Dreamworks is interested (however commercially) in exploring.  If Dreamworks turned Guyland into a movie, it might be about that college freshman who rushes a frat and lives happily ever after.  If Judd Apatow turned Guyland into a movie, it'd be about three guys who don't fit the frat image, but maybe one of them somehow gets in, but in the end they remember that their friendship matters most and that's what ultimately prevails.  If an unknown indie company turned Guyland into a movie, it would barely be about a frat at all, focusing instead on the life and times of some hipster kid who is perhaps joined by some super chill bros.