January 26, 2026
I find myself standing at the edge of an academic landscape, looking out at a terrain marked by deep valleys and towering peaks. In one direction, women’s studies rises like a mountain range, well-established, well-mapped. But in the other direction, where I long to explore, there’s only a faint trail leading into what should be vast territory: the study of men and masculinity.
This absence haunts me. We talk about men constantly, in history books, in news headlines, in our daily conversations, but we rarely turn the scholarly lens upon masculinity itself with the same rigor we’ve applied to femininity. We’ve left men strangely unexamined, as if their experiences were simply the default human condition rather than something specific, constructed, and worthy of study.
Men’s studies eventually emerged tentatively in the 1970s and 1980s as a small offshoot of feminist scholarship. Early pioneers asked crucial questions about how boys are socialized into masculinity and what pressures men face. But unlike women’s studies, it never gained institutional traction, remaining scattered across departments in a handful of courses and journals, never forming a department of its own.
What captivates me most, though, is the study of male sexuality itself, a dimension that remains even more marginalized than the broader field. We’ve developed sophisticated frameworks for understanding female sexuality, but male sexuality is often treated as simplistic, universal, or purely biological. We rarely examine how male sexual desire is shaped by culture, how it’s performed, and experienced across different contexts, orientations, and identities.
The absence of rigorous study in male sexuality feels like a profound blind spot in our understanding of the human experience. How do men learn to desire? How is male sexual pleasure constructed and regulated? How do factors like race, class, and sexuality intersect with masculinity to shape different experiences of desire and embodiment? These questions remain largely unexplored in academic contexts, yet they’re fundamental to understanding gender relations, power dynamics, and human fulfillment.
My interest in men’s studies, and particularly male sexual studies, stems from a conviction that we cannot achieve genuine gender justice without examining men as gendered and sexual beings. We cannot address issues like sexual violence, emotional repression, or relationship dynamics by only analyzing women’s experiences. We must ask what is happening to men, what expectations they absorb, what vulnerabilities they hide, what desires they suppress or express, and why.
The near-invisibility of men’s studies as a formal discipline reveals something telling about the kinds of inquiry deemed legitimate in academia. The fact that masculinity is everywhere in culture but almost nowhere as a stand-alone academic field is itself a revealing asymmetry. It tells us that studying men, especially male sexuality, still feels risky or uncomfortable to name.
What I envision is not a retreat from feminist insights but a deepening of them, a men’s studies that would examine men as gendered and sexual beings shaped by expectations they didn’t choose but often enforce. It would address concrete issues like male sexual health, desire, embodiment, and intimacy using both data and lived experience. It would take power seriously, acknowledging privileges and harms, while also making room for men’s vulnerability and the costs of rigid masculinity.
My interest in men’s studies is not about putting men at the center as the default subject. It’s about refusing to treat masculinity or male sexuality as invisible or inevitable. Just as women’s studies asked, “What happens when we finally take women’s lives seriously?” men’s studies might ask, “What happens when we finally study men and masculinity with the same critical, careful attention?”
That question, for me, is an invitation to explore uncharted territory, to ask uncomfortable questions, and to imagine better ways of being men, and being with men, in the world. It’s a journey into the unseen subject of our academic landscape, and one I feel compelled to undertake.