Recently the national news media jumped all over the story out of the University of Chicago that an undergraduate there, Steve Saltarelli, had started a “men’s advocacy” group called Men in Power (MiP). While the group claims to be a professional development organization, it’s important to take a closer look in an effort to understand why this has happened now and what it means in a larger cultural context.

On March 2nd of this year Saltarelli, a writer for The Maroon (the U of C school paper), published a column titled “Men in Power: True equality means groups that advocate for men as well as women.” While slightly tongue-in-cheek, the column still lays out a plan to create first a local and later a national group dedicated to “offer[ing] a unique opportunity for undergraduate men at the University of Chicago to expand and sharpen their knowledge of business, politics, and networking—giving them the skills they will need to become future leaders of the world.” He goes on to suggest that “the group would not be against or in any way attempt to inhibit the advancement of women. We would simply advocate for men in the same manner that female groups advocate for women.”

From there the column drifts further into the absurd, suggesting flag football games, pre-nuptial agreement workshops, and movie screenings as a way of male bonding—before finally suggesting, with more than a hint of resentment, that MiP get their “slice of the pie” like every other “special interest group” on campus, and specifically names the Chicago Friends of Israel and the UCDems as examples.

Saltarelli is clearly frustrated by what he perceives as a loss of power for men. Citing statistics regarding slipping male university attendance rates, he paints men as the victims of a lack of institutional support. If only men had the same “advocacy,” he seems to suggest, as those (liberal) campus groups, men might regain their apparently rightful position at the top of the hierarchy.

Despite Saltarelli's claims that this initial column was "satire" (thought it's not clear what he's satirizing since he agrees with everything in the column), the public disagreed.  This is critical to understanding the significance of the events: is it a joke that men are feeling the need for advocacy?  That they feel a loss of power?  That they blame women (and liberal insitutions) for such apparent losses?  Clearly Saltarelli (weakly) disguised his column as humor as a way of deflecting potential criticism.  What he didn't expect was the positive response he got from men willing to join such a group.  From there it turned from a "joke" to reality.

Here’s Saltarelli on MSNBC:

This interview makes clear the real agenda of MiP: for men to be the center of attention again. While he acknowledges that men dominate the professional world, he also performs some bizarre math when he says “if we cultivate men in leadership it doesn’t mean that there has to be less women in leadership.” Well, that’s exactly what it means: his argument that men have lost power means that someone else (women) have gained it; to return it to men means taking it from women.

When groups like this emerge, they do so as a direct response to the gains made by feminist activism. Women’s advocacy groups were formed and continue to operate because of the massive gender disparity across society, in education, in leadership positions, in the business world, and in nearly every economic sector. Virtually our entire culture is designed to “advocate” for men; that’s why, much as Saltarelli and his group may be confused by it, the U of C and other universities don’t have (or need, to be frank) a Men in Power chapter: men are overwhelmingly “in power” at universities and in culture, in small and large ways, all the time.  It's no surprise that this idea started out as a "joke."  How else can it be taken?  Even Saltarelli admits that 97% of Fortune 500 CEOs are men.

Rather than engage in separatist, resentful politics that emphasize the apparent slippage of male power, we should be more encouraging of men to work in coalition with women, to support their campus advocacy groups, and to strengthen diversity in the professional world. As Courtney over at Feministing says in resposne to MiP, instead of forming separatist groups, men should "take a step back and use some of that energy, humor, conviction, and creativity to start an organization that gets men and women to think together about ways to make the world more equal, more just, and a more hospitable place for all of us."  I couldn't agree more.

At the same time, we should also address the ways men are feeling a certain anxiety right now about economic losses and educational disparity. One way to do that is to encourage young men to take education seriously; masculinity is not incompatible with learning or higher education. And we should definitely pay attention to the men’s health issues that Saltarelli raises: prostate and testicular cancers and male depression and suicide are serious issues that need to be addressed. But they should not, as he suggests, be linked to an apparent gender disparity that favors media coverage of breast cancer.  That sort of language just makes obvious the resentment simmering within groups like MiP toward women and their apparent seizure of what "rightfully" belongs to men.

What ways might we focus on coalition instead of division? How can men’s groups exist on college campuses without falling back on anxiety-based claims of power loss and making claims of being “overlooked” in culture? Could Saltarelli’s idea be turned into something positive?

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Peter Alilunas is a graduate student at the University of Michigan.  He blogs at manvertised.com.