Misframing Men: The Politics of Contemporary Masculinities

The first decade of the new millennium has witnessed an extraordinary transformation in men's lives. For years, wave after wave of the women's movement, a movement that reshaped every aspect of American life, produced nary a ripple among men. But suddenly men are in the spotlight. Yet, the public discussions often seem strained, silly, and sometimes flat-out wrong. The spotlight itself seems to obscure as much as it illuminates. Misframing Men, a collection of Michael Kimmel's commentaries on contemporary debates about masculinity, argues that the media have largely misframed the issues.

Kimmel, among the world's best-known scholars in gender studies, discusses political moments such as the Virginia Military Institute and Citadel coeducation cases that reached the Supreme Court (he participated as expert witness for the Justice Department) along with Promise Keepers rallies, mythopoetic gatherings, and white supremacist recruitment. He takes on antifeminists as the real male bashers, questions the unsubstantiated assertions that men suffer from domestic violence to the same degree as women, and examines the claims made by those who want to rescue boys from the "misandrous" reforms initiated by feminism. In writings both solidly grounded and forcefully argued, Kimmel pushes the boundaries of today's modern conversation about men and masculinity.

Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. A highly visible advocate for gender equality, he is the author of the celebrated Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men and Manhood in America, the definitive history of American masculinity, among other books, and is the founding editor of Men and Masculinities. He was among the founders of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism.