Let’s reopen the conversation as to whether men, as well as women, deserve a place of their own.
Let’s reopen the conversation as to whether men, as well as women, deserve a place of their own.
W ith President Trump’s executive order restoring the definition of sex to federal law, and his follow-up enforcement actions that include threatening to yank education funds from the State of Maine for continuing to allow males to compete with and change alongside girls and women, the fight for women’s single-sex spaces may not be over, but it’s certainly trending the right way.
Understandably, the national conversation has focused on the erosion of girls’ and women’s rights, safety, and opportunities when males are allowed into their locker rooms, sports teams, and even prisons. The consequences of eliminating spaces for the female sex are obvious and severe, in some cases even leading to permanent physical injury and sexual assault.
But there’s another side to the slow elimination of single-sex spaces that, while less dramatic, may ultimately prove equally important: men suffer when denied their single-sex spaces as well.
Starting in the 1990s, one all-male space after another fell to the twin demands of cultural “progress” and evolving and misinterpreted civil rights law. For example, the former spelled the death knell of the all-male Elks Club, a fixture of mid-century American life. The Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks went co-ed by vote in 1995 after a series of pressure campaigns and lawsuits.
The following year, in 1996, the Supreme Court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute, an exclusively male military academy, had to admit women as a public institution following the majority of justices’ strict reading of the equal protection clause. As the late Justice Scalia wrote in dissent, “today [the Court] enshrines the notion that no substantial educational value is to be served by an all-men’s military academy.” Three years later, now-Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who has been outspoken on the need to keep girls’ spaces all-female, became the first woman to graduate from the Citadel Military College in South Carolina. Fast forward to today, and even the Boy Scouts are co-ed. And, of course, all of these changes in the 1990s were merely the capstone to a long retreat away from male-dominated spaces that used to include the workplace, most bars and clubs, gyms, and other public places.
The exclusion of women from men’s clubs, schools, or academies has been viewed as archaic discrimination, perhaps based on some false notion of women’s inferiority. But the battle to keep men out of women’s sports should engender new and sympathetic questions about what we lost when we made it illegal in nearly all cases for men to gather only with other men in a formal organizational setting, and whether there was a better way to balance the interests of women and men while preserving those opportunities for men.
It’s not a coincidence that the share of men who lack even a single close friend has shot up to 15 percent, a fivefold increase from 1990, and the problem is getting worse, with one in four men younger than 30 reporting they have no close friends at all. There has been a lot of focus and digital ink on the collapse of dating, but a corresponding and underappreciated collapse of friendship more generally, mostly same-sex friendship, has been going on since the early ’90s. And the very notion of the heroic male friendship, a fixture of literature for thousands of years, is now a “bromance” joke. Even Frodo and Sam in The Lord of the Rings are constantly characterized as gay by a culture that cannot take nonsexual male connections seriously.
In our focus on the advancement of girls, we seem to have forgotten that boys are bombarded from a young age with cultural messaging that treats their masculinity as inherently dangerous, toxic, or backward-looking. Fraternity, in the older and literal sense of the word, is considered passé.
Boys are hit with contradictory messages: women who enter their sports clubs and masculine spaces are supposed to be accepted simply as “one of the guys,” yet boys know that there is something wrong about taking advantage of their inherent physical advantages, for example, to best women in wrestling or basketball. They face jeers for “beating a girl” just as much as losing to one. Their sensitivities, desire for privacy, and dignity find few champions.
Since the vast majority of Americans now clearly agree that eliminating all-female spaces has been a disaster for girls and women, perhaps now is the time to consider the negative consequences of depriving boys and men of all-male spaces and to reopen the conversation as to whether men, as well as women, deserve a place of their own.