SOURCE: Sommers, Christina Hoff, and Stephen Goode. “Philosopher Advocate for American Boys.” Insight on the News (12 March 2001): 36-9.

[In the following interview, Sommers discusses The War against Boys and the status of boys in the American education system.]

Philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers is an old-fashioned feminist who believes in voting rights for women and a level playing field for both genders, but parts company when it comes to radical feminism and its disparagement of men. Five years ago she took on the feminist establishment in her book, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, which widely was pilloried by the establishment she eloquently attacked. “I know I became a feminist because I didn't like male chauvinism,” Sommers tells Insight. “But I do not appreciate female chauvinism, either.”

Last year Sommers brought out another deeply controversial book, The War against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. Misguided feminism, she argues, is causing American education to focus on girls at the expense of educating boys in the mistaken belief that girls are behind boys and need all the help they can get from government and educators to set that disparity right, even if it means ignoring young males. But, as Sommers shows, girls aren't behind boys. Far from it: They're way ahead and will continue to be until American education strikes a fair balance between the needs of boys and girls and treats both sexes with genuine equity.

[Goode]: Did the idea for The War against Boys come out of your experience writing Who Stole Feminism?

[Sommers]: Yes, because one of the things I did in the first book was uncover a lot of careless research and dubious statistics. In fact, I found at the heart of establishment feminism this body of egregiously false information.

What is sad and unfortunate is that this information is driving public policy by driving funding. And the area in which I found the largest number of mistakes and the most shoddy research was in education. The idea that girls are second-class citizens in our schools is preposterous.

The exact reverse is true. Boys are behind girls significantly in most areas and falling further and further behind. The college gap [the fact that there are more women in college in America today than men] favors girls and threatens to become a chasm.

It's a huge issue that wasn't getting any attention because we were misled. The American Association of University Women [AAUW], the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, the National Organization for Women [NOW] were able to give an entire nation a false portrait of our children, showing girls as languishing in silence while boys thrived, when exactly the opposite was true.

There probably never was a time when girls had more opportunities and were more ambitious and successful. But, if you look carefully, our boys are being put on the back burner in their educational needs.

Will women dominate in the professions in the America of the future while men take blue-collar jobs?

There's going to be more of that. In Europe, they're already ahead of us worrying about what happens when males become the second sex and whether this was anyone's idea of equity and fairness. It simply isn't in the interests of anyone to shortchange boys.

What is Europe doing?

In Britain, there have been several conferences of headmasters and headmistresses on what to do about the underachievement of British males. They believe that what we call junior high—the seventh and eighth grades, 12- to 13-year-old boys—is a critical time when you can lose that student and never get him back again.

They're experimenting with all-male schools. They're bringing in what one headmaster who wrote about it described as practices that hadn't been seen in British schools for 30 years, an old-fashioned pedagogy using war poetry and all-male classes. When a teacher divides a class into teams, everything is a competition [whereas current education fads frown on competition in any form], and the boys are thriving!

We could not do that here! If you tried to have all-male classes and competitions and war poetry! It's just not going to happen.

They're getting back to the old-fashioned notion that boys and girls are different?

That's right. Mother Nature is not a feminist; boys and girls are different. But our educational establishment seems to have accepted the idea, fashionable in gender studies, that the sexes are the same.

The philosophy and the logic of gender studies contend that any advantage boys have over girls is discrimination, but any advantage girls have over boys is a triumph. So, for girls, it's heads I win, tails you lose.

If Mother Nature isn't a feminist, she isn't what might be called a “masculinist,” either, is she?

No. But she's fair. For example, girls have certain advantages with verbal skills. If you gave a test and asked a demographically correct group of boys and girls to generate synonyms, the girls probably would do better. Boys have an advantage with spatial reasoning, which gives them some edge in mathematics.

So, as we would expect, girls gravitate more toward the languages and boys more toward math and science. I thought it was fine that schools want to make a special effort to interest girls in math and science and help them. But why didn't they do something for boys at the same time in reading and writing? We haven't seen that.

Also, girls care more about school, and this is probably the most important difference. They want the teacher to like them, so they'll do better in school and be better readers. They'll win the prizes. A lot of little boys don't care one single bit about school.

I have a son who didn't care. He cares now, but he's in the 11th grade. Early on he couldn't understand why I thought it was important to please the teacher. You have to make a special effort to interest boys in school. We are not making that effort.

Of course, there always will be exceptions. There are going to be as many as 20 percent of kids who will defy the stereotypes. But 80 percent will not, and that's what we have to remember.

Isn't it true that boys are at both ends of the extreme when it comes to math and science?

That's another tricky thing about the differences between the sexes. If you look at the very high end of the ability distribution, at the kids who are math and science prodigies and take the [math] SAT in the seventh grade and get 700 or 800 [800 is the perfect score], they are mostly boys.

I've heard everything from 13-1 favoring males to 7-1. There simply are more male math geniuses. Now, that's a small group of kids—we're not talking about the average boy in the seventh grade. But some feminists bristle at the idea that there are more boy than girl math and science prodigies. Yet if you go to the other extreme and look at the kids with learning disabilities, the borderline retarded and the kids who are total academic failures, most of them are boys, too. So at the very extremes you have more males.

What policies can we use to treat boys more equally?

I think the first thing to do is to realize that we have to work in both directions. We have to help girls and we have to help boys. And we have to realize that both have their special strengths and weaknesses, and schools should acknowledge that. It should no longer be the case that all attention is focused on the needs of girls and that boys are ignored and neglected.

In The War against Boys you write about teachers who openly are hostile to boys.

It's now clear to me that almost every boy will encounter a teacher who is hostile. Most teachers are not hostile—they love children, and they know that boys and girls are different. But then there is the young teacher who has come out of a teacher's college and who believes a lot of the false statistics and misinformation. She may come into her classroom with anger at little boys, viewing boys as obstacles to the success of girls, so they have to be taken down a little.

Some parents think, “Well, I don't need to worry because my son is gifted.” But if you have a gifted child, and it's male, there could be a lot of hostility because maybe he's just a little bit too much interested in math and science. Maybe he's too far ahead of the girls.

There was a satirical book called Women Are From Venus; Men Are From Hell. That could be the slogan of the modern feminist movement. Men can handle it, but for little boys to meet up with some of these resentful, angry women—well, it's just sad.

I've heard sad stories from boys telling me there would be a special science program or artificial-intelligence seminar and they couldn't wait to go but were told it's only for girls. Now, that is ridiculous. And I also could have written a book called The War against Girls based on the experience of the girls forced to go to those seminars.

So girls suffer too?

A lot of what goes on is just mean-spiritedness when it comes to not approving of what girls do. You might have a girl who has an aptitude to do science, but maybe she's more interested in education or dance or creative writing. Sometimes such girls are, for purely ideological reasons, bullied by their science teachers into science.

There are huge amounts of resources spent these days [on getting women into science], and there are great, brilliant women scientists. But, even if she has the aptitude for science, if that's not what interests her and that's not where her heart is, then why force her in that direction?

So they want to change the number of women in science, come what may?

They're desperate to change that. Now some feminists will say they need to do this because of sexism in engineering. Well, there was sexism in every field. There was sexism in journalism, medicine, law—fields in which women are approaching parity with men.

So if sexism wasn't enough to hold women back in the seventies and eighties when the great changes occurred, it's something else that is holding down their numbers in engineering and physics and math. Those are the three fields [where there are more men than women]. Women's groups frame this as a “crisis” when it comes to those three fields.

But it's not framed as a crisis that psychology is dominated by women now, or veterinary medicine. Pharmacy is female-dominated, but it's not in crisis, that's not a problem.

How has your professional training in philosophy influenced your attitude toward feminism?

If you go to graduate school in philosophy it's like getting a nonsense detector installed in your brain. You become very alert to fallacies. As a result, when I started reading feminist philosophy in the eighties, I found it unbalanced, to say the least.

I was a liberal and a feminist. The chair of my department asked me to teach feminist philosophy, so I sent off for the textbooks thinking that they would be like other philosophy textbooks in which you would read pros and cons on controversial issues.

You'd read about a philosopher who strongly believes in free will and one who strongly believes in determinism, so that a student comes away being able to argue both sides. The teacher's job was to give students a logical apparatus with which to analyze the arguments.

That's what I thought feminist philosophy would be when I ordered those textbooks, expecting to examine arguments for and against abortion, affirmative action and surrogate motherhood. Instead, it was conspiracy theory about the patriarchy, and the articles were organized mutually to reinforce one another so that the student came away angry and paranoid about American society.

One of their favorite themes was that America is a rape culture. Male hegemony is another, and that [women] are victims of a capitalist, heteropatriarchal, oppressive system. And that's fine, if you then have someone defend the capitalist heteropatriarchy. But they left that out.

When I would debate my colleagues in philosophy it quickly would come down to disagreements about facts. They would claim that one in three American women is battered and that there are masses of women with eating disorders. They would give a picture of American society that was quite horrible and didn't fit with my experience and intuition. When I started to check their facts, I found many of them to be wrong.

Do you think this sort of thing will continue to influence American education?

Oh, I don't think it can continue for very long because I'm basically an optimist about the good sense of the American people. We swing in one direction and have to be brought back. I think the pendulum has gone about as far as it can go with this girl crisis and will have to come back to reality and fairness.

But it's going to take some work. The groups that promoted this view weren't terribly good statisticians or researchers, but they were excellent networkers and publicists. I admire the AAUW for those talents. They really knew how to get publicity. They would do a study and it might be very poorly organized, but they were good about getting it highlighted in Time magazine or the New York Times and then mobilizing members of Congress to, say, pass the Gender Equity Act.

We have millions of dollars targeted for underprivileged kids, which is fine, but now they have girls included in the list of the underprivileged. Really, along with Native Americans, handicapped kids and African-Americans, you have girls. So it's basically just boys who are left out. Even the boys in the other designated groups are left out of many of those programs. So the whole thing is unfair. But it takes longer to untie knots than it does to tie them.

Are you working on a book right now?

Yes. The tentative title is The Republic of Feelings. It's about how as a society we are told we should be in touch with our feelings and open about them and disclose them and share everything and be self-involved. I am defending stoicism, bringing that back against all of this emotivism.