Look on the bright side, Women's Center

It may be time to abolish the Women's Center, or downgrade its leading role in UConn's cultural hierarchy. Because if anything, this university - and every college in the nation - needs a Men's Center, as America faces a disaster of masculinity rather than of femininity.

What's good for women is good for everyone, of course, and there's no reason not to confront a social challenge. But the recent "Take Back the Night" march, while a commendable idea, exemplifies much of what's wrong with American feminism. The women of the developing world may need to take to the streets in anger, but America's problems require less talk of "oppression" and "herstory," and more Zen-like cool.

Take that march, for example. Attacking sexual assault head-on is satisfying, but simplistic - because sexual assault isn't a problem. It's a symptom of a society that judges the worth of women in a large degree based on their sexual desirability, while praising men mostly for their breadwinning prowess and romantic conquests. Attempting to take back the night without attempting to take back the values is like protesting emphysema, but not cigarette usage. Why not protest on-campus "Ladies' Nights" that implicitly value drunken female sexual availability, or protest the incessant "[profession] and hos" parties - things that campus-localized initiatives might be able to greatly influence? Or, indeed, why not move beyond talk of "oppression" and the "gender wage gap" completely - language that, clearly, reinforces the conception that men are mere bread-winners and exercisers of force.

But while I can hope, I don't expect on-campus activists to update their methods. America's gender dialogue has been doing the time warp again since the '70s, and no one seems to want to acknowledge the sexualized elephant in the room: the crisis of man.

The battle cry of America's feminists seems to be the glass ceiling and the gender wage gap, the infamous 78 cents a woman earns to each man's dollar. But women make different decisions than men about their career goals, career trajectories and relative values, and short of demanding that women mimic men, it's not clear what can be done to fully close any gap. As an example, a recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers concluded that the ongoing recession may harden the glass ceiling in the financial industry as increasing numbers of women decide the high-pressure, risky lifestyle isn't for them. I fail, however, to see a glass-ceiling-shattering alternative short of telling women to value their jobs over their families and their own satisfaction, all for the sake of equality.

In fact, matching men point-for-point in the careerist rat race may be the last thing anyone would want to do. Because careers, unlike families, come to an end - leaving workaholics with little during retirement. Men older than 65 seem to have more difficulty than similar women in finding meaning in their retired lives, and commit suicide at disproportionately high rates. And despite their lower earnings, other studies in America show that women are just as happy as men, and in recent years, even happier, as well as longer-lived.

So while women have the gender gap, men have the suicide, unhappiness and death gap. Men are also more likely than women to suffer from violent crime, despite what a fixation on sexual assault would lead one to believe.

And if any gender's long-term economic future is bleak, it's that of men. Though men earn more than women as of now, that gap is closing and has been for decades. A gap that has been growing, meanwhile, is the education gap of both earnings and of happiness; since the l980s, there has been a dramatic widening in the difference in earnings and satisfaction between those with college degrees or better, and their less-educated fellows. This is seriously bad news for men, given that women already made up 56 percent of college undergraduates in 2006, and their dominance has only grown. Worse yet, enrollment rates understate the true severity of the problem because women are also more likely to finish their degrees and graduate than are men.

So I ask: do America's women really want to 'achieve equality' with men? Well, we'd first need a Men's Center to be square, obviously. But if suicide, early death, violent crime and uneducated decadence sound like a good trade for a raise, then go ahead - ladies first.