I am writing to address concerns with Mr. Bohl’s arguments advanced in his article published on March 3 “Be a man, our culture will value you less.”

First, Mr. Bohl addressed his concern there is a dearth of “men’s study courses” that engage in meaningful discussion about “men and gender.” While this may in fact be true, I wanted to suggest a possibility of why that might be.

First of all, men do not come from a historically oppressed group. Women did not become regularly educated at the college level until the 1960s, and even now, in many classes taught at the college level, men wrote the majority of the work discussed.

On almost every college campus, students enjoy the ability to take a Shakespeare class or to study other classical works written by men; women’s studies provides interested parties with the opportunity to explore works that may have received little notice in college courses until the last half century.

Furthermore, Mr. Bohl ties this lack of available classes to an unrelated conclusion; that young men are among the least valued members of society. However, a more analogous situation would be the fact that there are no “white racial study courses” at Iowa State.

The conclusion does not then follow that, because there are critical race theory courses, black people are more valued than white people in society. There is a serious disconnect between the legitimate concern that there should be classes more relevant to men’s concerns about their changing role in society and Mr. Bohl’s conclusion that men are somehow less “valued” by society.

Secondly, Mr. Bohl accurately noted that men lose their lives in non-military related positions at a higher rate than female workers in the United States. However, there is no connection between that fact and the idea that “young men” are the most “disposable” people in American society.

Just because women are “equal under the law” does not suggest that women are somehow physically capable of performing the same feats of strength as men or have equal physical abilities. Furthermore, while it maybe true that 93 percent of non-military workplace deaths fall upon men, that may be due to the requirements of the job.

For example, it is legal for states to implement a bona fide occupational qualification where only men can be hired for “high risk” positions, such as security guards in maximum-security prisons. Without further data giving context to the information, this statistic reveals very little.

It is not that “young men” are “disposable” or less valued by society. In fact, that assertion is completely at odds with the millions of dollars that Americans donate to support our male-dominated troops and the billions of dollars the U.S. government spends to keep our troops safe.

In fact, the Obama administration proposed a budget of $159.3 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for fiscal year 2011. This demonstrates not indifference to the sacrifices of our heavily male troops, but rather the full support of the country.

Finally, when discussing equal opportunity, we must first approach the threshold question of what sort of advantages one person has over another. In the case of “gender roles,” men have the advantage of history.

To somehow draw the conclusion that women should be grateful that they make less money than men for performing the exact same work because women are more “valued” in society is a straw man argument. In fact, pay scales suggest that men are “valued” in society at a rate 23 percent higher than women.

The fact that a young man willingly entered military service, or any other dangerous profession, at the legal age of 18 should have no bearing upon a woman’s earning potential because the two are in no way related.

To suggest that there is a connection between the two miscasts the argument and does a disservice to the readers of the Iowa State Daily.