We are behind for a reason

If you read the latest adult gossip about college in the New York Times, or if you are actually among tomorrow’s leaders in one of these fine institutions, you may have noticed that the female to male ratio on campus is becoming remarkably acceptable. It’s a result that I never could have imagined when my middle school friends and I used to thumb through the Princeton Review guide looking for the schools with the best odds. But the growing presence of girls on campus is a fact noted around the academic world.

The predominant male knee-jerk reaction to this fact is a claim of bias. This is the best defense mechanism of every powerful group in our society that feels its authority questioned. The bias argument asserts the reason males are falling behind in school is nothing less than a system of structured inequality perpetuated by man-hating subversives who call themselves teachers.

By placing the emphasis on supposed extenuating circumstances, this meathead attitude misses the actual source of this gender gap-the meatheads themselves. Boys have lost ground because of we get shitty grades, not because our teachers give them shitty grades.

From every direction these days, boys are given strong messages about who they’re supposed to be. Television commercials, just as they do for every ethnic group or gender, tell us who we’re supposed to be. According to the advertisements we see, we’re supposed to eat and drink massive amounts, think about sex every 7.8 seconds, and be either a juiced up athlete or a morbidly obese couch dweller.

Sports are a critical factor here because they are of central importance to the American male. We have been playing and watching sports our whole lives, and we tend to get excited about them in case you haven’t seen a stadium full of NFL fans. There’s no question that these activities do not make the world any better off, in fact, sports probably make the world much worse. If you’re a huge sports fan, as I am, and you don’t accept the fact that sports are part of the military-industrial complex, you live in a much too simple world.

You wouldn’t be alone in that ever-widening world, though. Men like things that are uncomplicated. We like to know the right answer as quickly as possible, and we’d rather not talk about the grey areas that inhabit every corner of our existence. That’s why we can do endless calculus problems but can’t comprehend why the hell we have to read all these damn women authors. It’s no coincidence that one of our own describes us as babies in Lady Chatterly’s Lover.

These observations might really only apply to a few of us, but it’s getting harder and harder to tell. Girls may go to the bathroom in groups, but guys travel in packs. There’s not a man around who doesn’t live in constant fear of locker room ridicule and the like. The thought of being laughed at by a room full of men more manly than yourself controls our actions like a screaming shithead high school coach. And right now, there’s nothing more girly than reading books.

None of this means that the burgeoning group of females accepted to college is a reason for alarm. I would argue that the meathead’s absence from many of my classes is enhancing my experience in several ways. With more females around, discussions are more engaging, professors feel a lot more comfortable, and the class is a lot more enthusiastic overall. Also, they’re very easy to find beautiful.

The world might be changing this way. The more women who graduate college, the more who will begin to inhabit positions of power in our society. Hillary Clinton might become President. And the meatheads will look back at high school Friday nights as the best time of their lives. In the meantime, we should do absolutely nothing to encourage their presence anywhere in our lives.