SOURCE: Attarian, John. “Let Boys Be Boys.” World and I 15, no. 10 (October 2000): 238-43.

[In the following review, Attarian calls Sommers's The War against Boys a timely, persuasive, and well-argued book.]

American girls, mainstream belief has it, are shortchanged by our educational system and socially silenced, while boys are favored. Moreover, our society dragoons boys into a brutalizing model of manhood that forces them to become macho. Hence, boys must be reconstructed to be like girls. Shootings and predatory violence against girls in our schools underscore the need to feminize boys.

In The War against Boys, a well-argued, timely book, former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers, W. H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, persuasively shows that the reality is grimly different. Educators are demonizing and discriminating against boys, forcing them to act against their own nature. Americans are turning against boys, Sommers argues, forgetting that normal males' energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring are highly beneficial. And bad boys are not products of macho socialization.

A BOGUS CRISIS

The prevailing myths regarding boys and girls are products of deliberate promotion, Sommers reveals. In 1990 Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, announced that girls were being educationally victimized and psychologically stifled. The popular media seized on Gilligan's work and began deploring a “crisis” among girls. So did organizations with feminist agendas. In 1991 the American Association of University Women (AAUW) commissioned a poll revealing that most adolescent girls had a “poor self-image.” The following year it commissioned and vigorously promoted another study, How Schools Shortchange Girls, which claimed a causal link between girls' alleged second-class academic status and poor self-esteem. Only years later did it emerge that these studies were biased against boys and erroneous.

“It is really clear that boys are No. 1 in this society and in most of the world,” pontificated Patricia O'Reilly, director of the University of Cincinnati's Gender Equity Center. “It may be ‘clear,’ but it isn't true,” Sommers bitingly retorts, citing abundant evidence. Girls outnumber boys in all extracurricular activities except sports. They outperform boys academically, too—reading more, getting better grades, matching or exceeding boys' enrollment in high school math and science courses. Girls are more interested in school and spend far more time on homework. Boys increasingly lag in reading and writing. And in a historic reversal, far more girls than boys now attend college. Far more adolescent boys than girls commit suicide.

The truth about boys' underachievement and demoralization is seeping out, but feminist groups such as the AAUW are resisting, even training educators to cope with “revisionists” who challenge the short-changed-girl dogma. To help boys, Sommers argues, we must repudiate the partisanship distorting discussions of sex differences among schoolchildren and objectively, fairly analyze the causes of those differences. But this cannot happen while the divisive pro-girl campaign goes unchecked and unchallenged.

WARPING BOYS TO FEMINIST SPECIFICATIONS

The propounders of the manufactured crisis of diminished girls now argue that boys need special efforts to undo society's foisting of violence-promoting masculine stereotypes on them. Specifically, we must feminize boys. “We have an incredible opportunity,” gushed one gender-equity specialist. “Kids are so malleable.”

In justification, gender-equity advocates such as Katherine Hanson, director of the Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA) Publishing Center, claim that nearly four million women are beaten to death every year, that battering by a man at home is the leading cause of injury to women, and so on. These assertions, Sommers shows, are wildly inaccurate. Equity promoters also maintain that children are born androgynous and socialized into their gender identities, and that they can be easily molded into another identity to promote equity and social justice. In fact, accumulating empirical evidence discloses that gender differences are largely innate, not learned, and that children's play preferences are mostly determined by hormones.

In a disturbing valuation of ideological correctness over truth, feminists pillory scientists researching innate gender differences, try to discourage this research, and deny the validity of its findings. Why? It is obvious, Sommers argues, that feminists have an understandable fear that these findings will be used to restore old, demeaning stereotypes of female inferiority that invoked innate differences to oppress women.

Here, as in her repeated crediting of the gender benders with good intentions, Sommers is much too generous, even naive, denying the highly plausible and more sinister possibility that gender-equity advocates are ideologues in revolt against reality. Moreover, her focus on the immediate present precludes definitiveness. The evidence is overwhelming that feminists have been waging a holy war of hate against men and maleness, and that it didn't start with Gilligan. Before World War I, even in such prominent outlets as the Atlantic Monthly, feminists were demonizing men. Seething with hostility, they asserted gender interchangeability, condemned socialization of males to violence and competition, and called for feminization of men. Today's androgyny project started in the sixties; scientific evidence of innate gender differences was already emerging in the seventies.

Otherwise, Sommers is persuasive, as when she concludes that promoters of gender equity “are far too reckless with the truth, far too removed from the precincts of common sense, and far too negative about boys to be playing any role in the education of our children.” She also rightly condemns their authoritarian, high-handed approach.

Ominously, the feminizing of boys proceeds apace in public schools. Children in grades K-3 are indoctrinated against sexual harassment. Equity advocates and teachers stress cooperative activities, such as “nonthreatening” versions of tag. Grade-school boys are urged to dress like girls, play with dolls, and assume female roles for class projects. That boys and even girls are unhappy with this leaves educators unmoved.

The federal government and legal system mightily facilitate this gender-bending project. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 forbids sex discrimination in any educational institution getting public funds. To avoid discrimination charges and penalties, many schools and school districts employ feminist equity advocates. Moreover, the Department of Education funds many boy-reconstruction projects and materials; its WEEA Publishing Center distributes literature proclaiming that innate gender differences are minimal. Terrified of lawsuits, schools treat normal boys as sexist criminals; thus a three-year-old was punished for hugging a classmate. A 1999 Supreme Court decision that sexual harassment laws may be applied to schoolchildren will, Sommers plausibly predicts, make matters even worse.

Sommers fingers Gilligan as the person most responsible for the shortchanged-girl myth that has given gender reconstruction intellectual respectability. In A Different Voice (1982), Gilligan argued that females stress caring and connection in addressing moral problems, whereas males emphasize justice and rules. Her Making Connections (1990), drawing on interviews with girls at a New York school, asserted that girls were being shortchanged and “silenced.” In 1995, Gilligan turned to boys. Children, she claimed, are born androgynous, and boys are emotionally scarred by being separated from their mothers, isolated from their own feelings, and pushed into a competitive, striving male identity.

In one of her book's strongest parts, Sommers weighs Gilligan's work at length and, quite persuasively, finds it wanting. Gilligan is extremely protective of her 1982 book's data, refusing repeated requests from Sommers and others to see them, which naturally raises questions about their quality. (With this fact now public, will she finally disgorge them?) Also, Gilligan's scanty, anecdotal evidence hardly supports her 1990 claims; she gave shallow statements by clueless girls significance far beyond their merits. Her explication of her key concept of “voice” rests on circularity (“by voice I mean voice”) and cloudy metaphors (“psychic breathing”).

As for Gilligan's work on boys, Sommers is devastating. Gilligan offers no evidence for her claims and “does not seem to feel that her assertions need to be confirmed empirically.” The problem with unhappy, violent boys is not separation from the mother but absence of a father; empirical evidence reveals high correlation between fatherlessness and crime. Yet Gilligan is oblivious to this, being more interested in reconstructing boys. Her understanding of and empathy with boys are questionable, as are her wisdom and objectivity.

The evidence Sommers presents thoroughly justifies her conclusions:

We have yet to see a single reasonable argument for radically reforming the identities of boys and girls. There is no reason to believe that such reform is achievable, but even if it were, the attempt to obtrude on boys and girls at this level of their natures is morally wrong. The new pedagogies designed to “educate boys more like girls” (in Gloria Steinem's phrase) are not harmless. Their approach to boys is unacceptably meddlesome, even subtly abusive.

Male supporters of Gilligan, such as Dr. William Pollack of Harvard Medical School's McLean psychiatric hospital, are just as wrong in seeing normal boys as pathological and in need of rescue. In a refreshing, long-overdue reality check, Sommers points out that the military ethos damned by Gilligan, Pollack, and others has many virtues: honor, camaraderie, and self-sacrificing devotion. And there is nothing wrong with pursuing stoicism rather than self-indulgent gushing.

SHORTCHANGING BOYS ACADEMICALLY AND MORALLY

Boys are also being maleducated. Despite evidence that a demanding, highly structured approach to teaching language and literature works well with boys, American educators are de-emphasizing learning, competitive grading, and structure, with grim implications for our future in an increasingly competitive, skill-based world.

British boys trail behind girls in reading and writing, too, but the British are deeply concerned about this. They are committed to improving boys' performance and restoring traditional approaches: highly structured learning, demanding standards, all-boy classes, homework checks, and frequent tests. Performance is improving markedly with these methods. Yet American educators' debates over pedagogies ignore the issue of which one works best for boys—which Sommers rightly finds frustrating. Hence nothing is being done to help underachieving boys.

This started, Sommers maintains, with eighteenth-century German and Swiss educators who analogized children to plants, arguing that children, like plants, should be allowed to develop freely. American Progressive educators also stressed low-pressure learning and letting children follow their own interests. True enough—although, oddly, she never mentions John Dewey.

British success with traditional pedagogies implies, she argues, that boys are “paying the highest price for the current misguided fashions in education.” Yet such fashions persist. American experience with single-sex education of boys, while limited, is quite encouraging—but feminists are fanatically resisting all-male education. Moreover, the feminist-inspired 1996 Supreme Court ruling on the Virginia Military Institute greatly discouraged all-boys' education. Nevertheless Sommers is optimistic, arguing that once the American public understands the situation, sensible reform will follow quickly. One hopes she's right.

The maleducation of boys extends to their moral formation. While all children need clear, firm moral guidance, this is especially true of boys, who are far more prone than girls to mischief, mayhem, crime, and violence. Civilizing them requires much constraint by adults. When boys don't receive it, barbarism ensues. Sommers cites group sexual assault on girls in public swimming pools in the South Bronx; the rape of a retarded girl by high school athletes in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; and the Spur Posse gang of Lakewood, California, whose members competed in sexually exploiting girls. To feminists, these outrages indicate pervasive violent misogyny, caused by sexist male socialization. But Sommers, examining the Glen Ridge and Spur Posse cases more closely, found that the boys had been allowed to misbehave for years with impunity. She argues convincingly that “the problem with these young male predators was not conventional male socialization but its absence.” Faulting masculinity as such is a red herring, she adds; focusing on this distracts us from the failures of moral education.

Unfortunately, some educators and jurists still refuse to grasp this reality. Sommers rightly traces this to modernity's embrace of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's repudiation of original sin. Seeing children as inherently good, Rousseau argued that they should be allowed to develop freely. Having swallowed Rousseau's ideas, American education has abdicated its character-formation role, leaving children to flounder. Sommers likens this to turning them loose in a chemistry lab to discover their own compounds. “We should not be surprised when some blow themselves up and destroy those around them.” Here, as elsewhere, Sommers bears out conservative philosopher James Burnham's observation that “the best cure for a bad case of ideology is a strong dose of common sense.”

Herself a mother of sons, Sommers closes optimistically. She cites feminist mothers who tried to raise their sons by feminist dogmas but stopped when they realized that “they were coercing their sons to act against their natures.” Thanks to the mothers' love for their sons, reality and fairness trumped ideology—a hopeful sign that America, too, will return to its senses.

The War against Boys is a frightening revelation of a deeply disturbing phenomenon: an ideology radically at odds with reality laying hard hands on helpless children. Not since Marxist-Leninist states tried to reconstruct their peoples through indoctrination and compulsion has there been such a heavy-handed campaign to warp human beings to fit ideology. That these ideologues regard other people's children as putty to be molded as they like should outrage all Americans, regardless of their politics, especially parents. Sommers observes that parents have no idea what's happening to their sons. Her badly needed book will enlighten them. If it finds the readership it deserves, it may spare millions of children unwarranted misery.