Brown University has launched a weekly discussion group for students where men will be taught how toxic masculine norms harm them. The Masculinity101 programme will help students unlearn and unpack things they have learned about the subject.
The university launched the discussion group to address the growing violence on campuses as it seems that the socialization of men plays an important role in it.
“How men are socialized plays into the type of violence that exists in college communities. The harm and violence that men inflict is not strictly contained to the self-harm mentioned previously. Men will often resort to violence to resolve conflict because anger is the only emotion that they have been socialized to express,” Brown said in a statement.
In one of its studies, the World Health Organization (WHO) has previously said that the reason men were dying at younger ages and in dangerous ways was the result of how masculinity was defined in the society.
“In 2000, the World Health Organization (WHO) acknowledged the need to pay greater attention to the shorter life expectancy of men and identified a lack of understanding of the role of ‘masculinity’ in shaping men’s expectations and behaviors as a primary causative factor for the health disparity between men and women,” Brown added.