‘Be a Man’ starts second year Tuesday
The “Be a Man” lecture series kicked off for its second year Tuesday evening with a lecture from Dennis Pruitt, USC’s vice president for student affairs.
The series probes perceptions of masculinity, stereotypes and what being a man means, including social gender gaps and differences between men’s and women’s performances.
Those issues hit home at USC, too.
Men account for about three-quarters of judicial violations at the university, Pruitt said, while women earn about 70 percent of honors and awards. Men are less likely to go to college, and those who enroll are less engaged on campus than their female peers, according to a number of articles Pruitt cited.
Men often need guidance to get involved in school, and Pruitt said that administrators should push to reach out to a diverse pool of men.
“Educators on college campuses should be mindful of ways to get men to step out of their cultural comfort zones and spend time with men of different ethnicities, religions, sexual orientations and abilities,” Pruitt said.
The effects of the gender gap also spread to life outside academics, Pruitt said.
Health issues are on the rise for men, he said, and men account for 86 percent of suicides.
It also affects how men interact with their families and with women, who were a little over half the audience in the Capstone Campus Room Tuesday night.
Pruitt discussed an article about a woman who wrote that it was hard for her to find a man right for her because when she mentioned her salary or lifestyle, it seemed that men felt that her life was too good for them.
There’s a growing stereotypical distinction between the way that fathers raise men and the way that women raise men, Pruitt said. It’s normal for a man to teach his son how to perform everyday activities, but it’s not normal for a woman to show men how to express emotion, according to Kate Stone Lombardi, whose book “The Mama’s Boy Myth” has been excerpted for the Wall Street Journal.
Pruitt criticized the way men’s outrageous behaviors are sometimes dismissed with the excuse that “boys will be boys.”
The Facebook page “Be a Man at USC” recommends some books on the topic, including Michael Kimmel’s “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men” and Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird.” Atticus Finch leads Lee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel as a model of moral masculinity.
“One thing that keeps us from our own growth is (the idea) that we are our own prisoners in our own cells, but we have the key,” Pruitt said.