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Today in class we'd talked about what it is that we need to make the study of gender and sexuality appealing to both sexes, engaging for various pools of people. That's something I'd thought about many times and I think a number of months ago I finally got my answer.
I asked a close male friend of mine what it was like to be a man in this world. By that point I'd listened to many women's narratives and many men's narratives, but the men's narratives seemed to come from the infamous "neutral" point - since in a phallocentric society the neutral experience is predominantly male and the female experience is invariably made into that of the outcast, the minority. He said it was tiring. That it was like constantly having to live through pre-written narratives with little to no room for the creation of one's own.
I was shocked, but in a good way. I think that in order to have a successful gender and sexuality curriculum we need to focus on the traps of traditional masculinity and masculine narratives in their relation to the non-dominant narratives. We tend to forget that the dominant culture, as male-oriented as it is, is rightly called out on hindering the progress of BOTH sexes (that is, if we're still sticking to the gender binary, which is a whole other issue) and we need to acknowledge that.