The Sorrows of Being a Male English Major

Over the past couple of years I’ve had to get used to being the only guy in the room. Last year at the New York State Summer Writer’s Institute I was in a fiction class of eighteen with only one other male, and was one of the few guys working for Cow Tipping Press. Every summer before I was one of the only boy employees at Kiddywampus (and the only one willing to work Princess-Fairy Camp when needed), with babysitting jobs on the side. And now I just finished up my training as an Americorps Service Member for an elementary school literacy program which, predictably, was also mostly women. A look at my resume, and you’d probably give three-to-one odds that I was female. That’s the life of an English/education major, I guess.

I should be clear that this isn’t some kind of men’s rights screed against the oppression of the matriarchy. At worst, my position as a straight, white, middle-class, Christian male gets me moderately uncomfortable sometimes, and even that’s rare. Mostly it’s a non-issue, which I know is far from the story a woman entering a male-dominated field would tell. And God knows that I’m much happier working at a toy store or school than, say, in the axe body spray-filled university-sized locker room that I imagine business school is. 

Still, there are times when I’ve felt left out. It’s a small problem, but it still hurts, and I think it’s worth writing about all the same.

There was this book that circulated through my family during our last year in Waco called Pick Me Up, which was basically a huge collection of infographics and random facts on topics the authors must’ve chosen by throwing darts at a college course catalogue. I still remember that page 87 described the evolutionary and biological features of masculinity, dating back to hunter-gatherer societies, while page 127 described the same thing for femininity. One column explained how men operated on a “fight or flight” reflex in times of scarcity, while some scholars theorized that women alternatively used a “tend and befriend” framework. Another claimed that, even in the most socially-constructed view of gender, men are still angrier and more prone to violence than women. A couple other fun fact sheets I found as a kid, along with a lot of explicit instructions, told the same story: girls had their world of creativity and caring, while boys got to fight over who gets to be leader. As a boy who never had much of a shot at being the alpha male and didn’t see much in it in this first place, it’s probably not much of a surprise that I spent most of my time in elementary school hanging out with girls.

Again, this isn’t something that bothers me much these days. But sometimes it does. Sometimes I come across a character that makes fun of less-than-manly men as lazy, weak, naive, spoiled, pretentious, arrogant, or, at best, as a soul too pure for this world who can only hope to inspire the real heroes with their inevitable death. And I can’t help seeing myself in them.

But, for all the thinking I’ve been doing about it, I think the best answer is just not to think about it. Kids don’t care if you’re a boy or girl when you’re reading them a storybook, so long as you use funny voices and make sure they can all see the pictures. Your characters don’t know what your gender is, to them you’re the omnipotent God charting the plot of their lives at your whim, and anyway they’re probably less concerned with your gender is than why you’re making their lives so goddamn difficult. So screw it. That’s easier said than done, but if what I love doing is what I love doing, then the gender demographics of it isn’t going to change what I love about it.

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* If anything, it makes ingrained sexism even more apparent (if the publishing industry reflected the actual number of people writing, men would be lucky to have a couple feet of shelf space in any bookstore).