The September edition of Men’s Health magazine features an 8-page “special report” ranking the ten most “male friendly” and “anti-male” schools in America. Much of the article can best be characterized the way author Lawrence Roy Stains describes UC Santa Cruz: “Mean, with a trend toward ugly.” But some of it is downright dangerous, as when Men’s Health presents misinformation about sexual assault.
To Men’s Health, colleges are “anti-male” if they have “cranky” women’s studies departments that produce “Angry Young Women.” The magazine backs up a claim that Santa Cruz is “Male Hatred USA” by noting the school “boasts of having one of the largest women’s studies programs in the nation.”
Disturbingly, the Men’s Health article counsels men to avoid colleges with strong policies against sexual assault; such schools “redefine rape so that all men are guilty” and have disciplinary systems that are “rigged against men.” The magazine attacks schools that “parrot the feminist myths” about sexual assault. Bates College, for example, distributed a sexual violence handbook “repeating a long-discredited feminist canard–that one in four college women has been the victim of a rape or an attempted rape.”
Actually, the 1-in-4 statistic came from a scientific survey conducted in 1987 by Dr. Mary Koss for the National Institute of Mental Health, which found that 28 percent of women in college experienced rape or attempted rape, and 15 percent had experienced rape, since age 14. While Koss’ work has been attacked (Extra!, 11-12/93; Extra!, 9-10/94) by anti-feminist writers like Christina Hoff Sommers– whose opinions are prominently featured by Men’s Health— Koss’ findings, far from being”long-discredited,” are corroborated by a 1999 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that found that 1 in 5 female undergraduates had been raped in their lifetimes and 15 percent had been raped since age 15.
Men’s Health goes on to cite Department of Education statistics from 1994 showing that “there was actually less than one forcible sex offense for every 1,000 students.” This is an apples-to-oranges comparison, counting only reported, completed assaults that took place at college–not all attempts since age 14. Most law enforcement agencies agree that sexual assault is a vastly underreported crime; the Senate Judiciary Committee has estimated 84 percent of rapes never get reported. Moreover, the Department of Education’s one-time survey was hampered by many colleges tallying only those rapes brought to the attention of campus police, disregarding assaults disclosed to counselors or health services providers.
Men’s Health requires comparatively little from “male-friendly” schools,suggesting they have winning athletic teams, attractive women (“We’ve never met an ugly girl from Texas A&M”) and, as in the words of one Washington and Lee student, “a testosterone atmosphere… that permeates the whole environment.” They should have “more courses on the Great Books than on 12 oppressed womyn writers of Borneo,” since classes addressing gender are generally “nothing less than frontal assaults on men.”
Students should look for schools that give free reign for fraternities and have a tolerance for excessive drinking; at a “male-friendly” school, “you can play beer pong without campus security confiscating the Ping-Pong table.(It happened at Middlebury.)”
The fact is that most colleges have cracked down on drinking games and fraternity hazing because of concern for male and female students’ safety after years of alcohol-related injuries, assaults and deaths on campuses across the country, such as two alcohol-related fatalities at MIT and Louisiana State in 1997. “We have a policy against destructive drinking games, like ones where players have to drink until they fall down, to protect our students’ health and safety,” Middlebury spokesman Phil Benoit says. “Alcohol abuse is a very serious instigator of other problems–sexual assault is more prevalent when alcohol is involved; also, students can become alcoholics early in life from abusive college drinking. We don’t want that for our students.”
It is ironic that a magazine supposedly dedicated to keeping men physically and mentally healthy would advocate against policies promoting safe and responsible alcohol consumption, consensual sexual activity and diverse intellectual challenges.
More ironic is that the stated mission of Men’s Health‘s publisher, Rodale, is “to show people how they can use the power of their bodies and minds to make their lives better.” Rodale‘s website features glowing rhetoric about an “ideal” world “guided by the spirit of cooperation,” where “centered, self-reliant people…are capable of creating a better world for themselves.”
ACTION: Write to Rodale and ask them how an article attacking women’s studies departments, sexual assault policies, and limitations on alcohol abuse serves their vision of individuals cooperating to create a healthier world. You might also request that Men’s Health run an article examining alcohol abuse and sexual assault as actual threats to healthy life on campus.
