Jonathan Dean reacts dismissively to the news that I am suing the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics, where I was a student (Fear not, male readers, 8 September). "Martin claims he had the misfortune of being subject to a torrent of anti-male discrimination," Dean writes, adding: "Martin alleges that the course material he studied … was systematically anti-male, overlooked men's issues, and ignored any research that contested a 'women good, men bad' line of reasoning. Furthermore, [he claims] the Gender Institute drummed into the students … a simplistic view of women as victims and men as perpetrators."
Dean, a former researcher at LSE's Gender Institute, denies everything: "Gender studies programmes encourage students to acknowledge ... the limitations of a victim-centred understanding of womanhood." Fine words, but a close analysis of the core texts shows all the old, male-blaming biases are still there.
Patriarchy theory – the idea that men typically "dominate" women – is omnipresent, when research shows women tend to boss men interpersonally. Texts highlight misogyny but never misandry, its anti-male equivalent – despite research finding that women verbalise four times more misandry than men do misogyny. And the core texts highlight violence against women only, despite decades of research showing that women are more likely to initiate domestic violence.
"Let's get a few things straight," says Dean. "The dominant ideas, approaches and insights of the vast majority of academic disciplines are produced by, for and about men … there are entrenched gender biases in most fields … the key texts are overwhelmingly by and about men." By men? Perhaps, but discussions about actual men's issues are generally absent across curricula.
By pretending men's issues are disproportionately focused on, and by implying there is lots of anti-female bias elsewhere, Dean attempts to justify the continuation of attacks on men, and avoidance of men's-issues debates, as is standard in the gender studies orthodoxy today. When "women's studies" became "gender studies" departments, it signalled a new era of inclusion for men's issues – a rejection of this now is a betrayal of men and equality.
Dean offers up some token men: "The likes of Jeff Hearn and Michael Kimmel have paved the way for increasing numbers of men to contribute to academic gender studies." So, which issues do these academics actually discuss? "Class and racial inequalities between men, the causes and consequences of male violence, the lived experiences of different kinds of male sexuality, and the ways in which ideas of masculinity influence social and political thought." So discussions of male violence but not female-on-male violence.
Dean is effectively admitting the bias. The gender orthodoxy refuses to mention all those people fighting for equality in the fathers' rights movement, or all those boys and men enslaved in conscription, or men's shorter life expectancies. I enrolled at LSE's elite Gender Institute to learn how best to combat discrimination. In a world which verbalises four times more sexism against men than it does against women, it's high time gender studies set a better example, so we all might emulate it.
