[In the following review of The War against Boys, Harder comments that Sommers fails to take into account the influence of parents and popular culture on the socialization of children.]

If you think winning the presidency is hard these days, you should try being a boy. The banal tortures of forced play with dolls, “noncompetitive tag,” the abolition of recess, prohibitions against running, discipline imposed by “princessipals”—are but the tip of the iceberg of the “reconditioning” that author Christina Hoff Sommers describes and denounces in her provocative book The War against Boys. At issue, Sommers claims, is a clash of worldviews—over what human nature in general, and masculinity in particular, is and should be—fought in the arena of the schools. Whoever the victor of the battle, the victims are boys.

Sommers details how Harvard professor Carol Gilligan, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), and other like-minded organizations have imposed their strange brand of feminism in the schools, and popularized the notion that girls are being silenced, subdued and subjugated, while boys are aggressors-in-waiting who must, for the good of society, be conditioned to be more nurturing and emotive—and less boy-like.

However dubious their arguments, they have managed to initiate numerous federally funded programs, which they then develop and administer, effectively cornering the market on school-based gender-equity programs, and ensuring a captive audience of children to promote their ideas.

Sommers effectively picks off the sensational and largely unsubstantiated claims that girls are “shortchanged” and demoralized in school. She shows that “it is boys, not girls on the weak side of an educational gender gap.”

Boys lag behind girls in reading and writing, are less likely to graduate and go to college, and are more likely to be suspended, held back, commit crimes, and abuse drugs. Sommers' reliance on hard data contrasts starkly with the research conducted by Prof. Gilligan and the AAUW, much of which has never been subjected to peer review, and remains unavailable to the public.

DISDAIN OF BOYHOOD

But if Gilligan and others keep their data close to the vest, they wear their disdain of boyhood behavior on their sleeve. They portray boys as almost inherently pathological, claiming that “violence is gendered, and its gender is male.” If one starts with the presupposition that all boys are potential, if not actual, criminals, it follows that the way to reduce violence is to recondition men. Reconditioning never comes easily, so boys' resistance is to be expected but overcome. One cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

The picture Sommers paints of boys' mistreatment and reconditioning in schools is frightening; fortunately for boys, it is incomplete. When it comes to influencing children, parents and popular culture exert as much pull as do teachers, and do so in a different direction.

Parents exert the most influence in raising their kids and cultivating their character; they presumably would form the front lines of resistance against any attack on their boys. But Sommers offers little analysis or advice on a parent's role in the battle.

If parents (and particularly fathers) are engaged in their son's lives, they can do much to raise boys to be virtuous, disciplined and admirable men. If, on the other hand, parents cede the cultivation of their children's character to the schools, then boys' problems will extend far beyond a feminizing princessipal.

Sommers also ignores the powerful (if regrettable) influence of popular culture on boys. The entertainment industry with its endless production of violent, vulgar, and frequently misogynistic movies, music and video games largely caters to an adolescent male audience. Some feminists may want to “cure” boys of their masculinity; Hollywood would rather exploit it.

Given that the average boy spends more time each year in front of a movie, TV or video game screen than in the classroom, the messages of the antiboy partisans will be diminished, if not altogether drowned out, by the siren call of indulgent and titillating entertainment.

Perhaps the most important contribution of The War against Boys is its clear presentation of the results of the worldview undergirding the antiboy offensives. The battle against boyhood is predicated on the belief that human nature is constructed by societal influences, and can therefore be “torn down and reconstructed—in the right way” (emphasis in original).

The fact that “a growing body of empirical data … strongly supports the experience of parents and the wisdom of the ages: that many basic male-female differences are innate, hardwired, and not the result of conditioning” doesn't daunt Gilligan and her compatriots. While flouting research standards and ignoring hard data, Gilligan instead “compares her methodology to Darwin's.”

The comparison is revealing. Like Darwin, her findings are far more than a collection of discoveries; they are articles of faith, with enormous implications for moral reasoning, education and societal norms.

The belief that human nature is our own construction, and can thus be deconstructed and reconstructed at will flies in the face of what humanity has observed himself to be from the dawn of history, and is squarely at odds with both classical assumptions and the veritable Judeo-Christian affirmation that God created the human race to be male and female, equal but dissimilar, and stamped with the image of the divine. Thus, the war against boys is a war against human nature, and a denial of a Creator. The impulse to recondition human nature according to human tastes is as old as the desire to play God.

There were numerous other experiments in human reconditioning in the last century; all of them ultimately failed. Boys will always be boys, but the misguided agenda of the gender equity activists can still do great harm to boys and girls. All children need moral instruction, discipline and correction; they do not need to be reprogrammed or pathologized. Sommers' brave book shows the dangers of playing God with human nature, and the futility of the attempt.