The Claremont Colleges consortium in California recently wrapped up a semester-long “Masculinity Mondays” program established to address the “effects of unhealthy masculinities.”
The program, featuring seminars on “black masculinities,” “normative toxic masculinity,” and “(re)defined masculinities,” occurred bi-weekly as a means to “foster and create healthier masculinities within themselves and within the communities in which they exist.”
“The proposed topics are opportunities to initiate conversation, but each Masculinity Monday is free to go wherever the participants are interested,” a program description states, with one bi-weekly seminar consisting of an “open session with Nick Daily,” associate dean of the Office of Black Student Affairs.
According to the event description, “Masculinity Mondays” are part of the “Healthy Masculinities Initiative,” which is a joint project between the EmPOWER Center, the Office of Black Student Affairs, and 5C Student Affairs.
The EmPOWER Center’s Facebook page shows that “Masculinity Mondays” have occurred every semester since at least Spring 2017, when seminars such as “Exploring Male Privilege” and “Masculinities as Queer and Trans Folx [sic]” were taught.
The hour-long sessions were also offered on a monthly basis in Fall 2017, with seminars like “Constructing Masculinity through the Media” and “Rape Culture and Masculinity” being provided to students.
The Student Life reports that the “Healthy Masculinities Initiative” is just one of several programs enhanced by an almost $750,000 grant awarded to the EmPOWER Center by the Department of Justice in 2016.
Other schools across the country have offered identical programs in the past, including a “Masculinity Mondays” program at Lafayette College, which was open to “any who identify as male, in one degree or another” to “explore all that masculinity offers and takes in our culture.”
“From fluidity to tradition, masculinity is not an open book for those who live into it. It is often a question to be answered or a puzzle to be solved. For some it is an identity they create, for others it feels like a constraint they live with,” the event description stated.
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, offered a “Masculinity Mondays” program in 2015 for students to share their “thoughts on what it means to be masculine” while discussing “the stereotypes and ways [they] have been taught to be ‘masculine.’”
