“Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men” by Michael Kimmel was selected as the 2012-13 common book for Winona State University.
“Guyland” explores the complex and often troubling social world in which boys ages 16 to 26 are expected to make the transition to manhood. Kimmel argues that what was once a relatively clear and direct passage from adolescence to adulthood has become much more complicated and confusing as many young men embark on what seems to be an extended boyhood through the college years and beyond.
Kimmel examines both the causes and effects of this prolonged adolescence for both men and women and particularly its implications for adult relationships, families, and personal and professional success.
Kimmel is a prominent gender studies scholar and has authored and edited more than 20 books in the field. He is a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He has also worked as a consultant for corporations and public-sector organizations around the world on gender equality issues. Kimmel is tentatively scheduled to visit WSU Oct. 9-10 and again in spring 2013.
For more information about Kimmel or the WSU Common Book Project, email Ann-Marie Dunbar at adunbar@winona.edu.
Guyland is a wonderful book. Masculinity, Kimmel tells us, is not biological or “hard-wired” but rather “coerced and policed relentlessly by other guys.” “Homophobia — the fear that people might misperceive you as gay — is the animating fear of American guys’ masculinity.”
High school is “a terrifying torment of bullying, gay-bashing and violence.” Later, he acknowledges that gay-straight alliances now exist at many high schools.
This fact alone would suggest, as every other indication from the mainstream media does, that homophobia is a problem almost unimaginably reduced in virulence in the last decade.