Jack Kammer

Though I didn’t know the word “sexism” at the time, I recall experiences of it in my youth in the early 1960s. While girls received left-handed compliments about being good at math and science… “for a girl,” I heard that I was good with babies… “for a boy.” The cultural project of opening new vistas and life options for girls and women was getting underway without much attention being paid to the effects of sexism on boys and men. Correcting that imbalance became my life's work.

In 1982 I was on a co-ed softball team. Two weeks in a row, at our post-game bar, I had separate conversations with two women teammates in which they told me tales of woe about their boyfriends. Both ended with the same question: “And so he’s a real jerk, don’t you think?” I replied both times with “Well, maybe he’s a jerk, but from my point of view as a man, I can tell you that maybe to him the situation looks like this...” Both times I offered a possible alternative to male jerkiness that was perfectly clear and obvious to me. Both times the women answered, “Omigod, I never thought of that.”

So in 1983 on WCVT (now WTMD) at Towson University, north of Baltimore, I launched a radio show on male-female relationships. The first — and still most influential — book I read on my new topic was The Hazards of Being Male: Surviving the Myth of Masculine Privilege, published in 1976 by California psychologist Herb Goldberg.

It didn’t take long for me to realize that serious social problems are connected to society’s lack of awareness of male gender issues and the sexism that creates them. The show ran until 1989. The management of WFBR liked it and wanted to program it, but the station’s ad sales team said advertisers would never buy it for fear of making women unhappy.

That only convinced me all the more that male gender issues needed attention.