SOURCE: Edmundson, Mark. “Bad Boys, Whatcha Gonna Do …” Nation 271, no. 10 (9 October 2000): 39-43.

[In the following review of The War against Boys, Edmundson remarks that Sommers's argument essentially addresses the age-old question of nature vs. nurture in regard to gender differences. Edmundson criticizes Sommers for oversimplifying a “quiet, complex gender revolution” that is taking place in today's society.]

Not too long ago, the members of the Ms. Foundation for Women, the feminist group that inaugurated Take Our Daughters to Work Day, began concocting a comparable holiday for boys. They planned the first “Son's Day” for October 20, 1996, a propitious time, the organizers thought: October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. The activities that the Ms. Foundation recommended included taking your son (or “son for a day”) to an event focused on ending men's violence against women (“Call the Family Violence Prevention Fund at 800 END ABUSE for information”); playing a game with no scores and no winners; helping to make siblings' lunches and lay out their clothes for the school week ahead; shopping for and preparing the evening meal. And then, presumably, just kicking back and letting the good times roll on.

Ultimately, Son's Day was canceled; its originators backed off. “Nevertheless,” says Christina Hoff Sommers in The War against Boys, “Ms.'s attempt to initiate a boys' holiday is illuminating. It shows the kind of thinking girl advocates do when they reflect on what influences would be good for boys.” Sommers believes that girl advocates—or “misguided feminists”—are ascendant now in American culture and that they're turning boys' lives into a sorry morass.

The overt gist of Sommers' book [The War against Boys], written in stolid, mass-production-style prose, is that we've begun to think of boyhood as a pathological state. What society once considered a normal part of being a boy—aggression, energy, noise, restlessness; rampant, crude curiosity—now looks like sick behavior. The current archetypes for boys, the figures that popular culture takes to epitomize being young and male, are the thugs from the Spur Posse in California and the killers at Columbine High. The result is that boys are coming to hate themselves simply for being who they are.

This situation Christina Hoff Sommers is determined to amend. She's hot with righteous indignation on boys' behalf: Judgment Day approacheth.

To Sommers it's supremely patronizing (and dead wrong) to argue that strong masculinity is a disease, one that can, with the right kind of socialization, be cured. Boys need some indulgence if they're going to transform their wilder energies into civilizing drives. Turning furies into muses is no easy trick.

Sommers' book has a very contemporary feel to it. She spends a lot of time pulling together horror stories we've all heard from the recent news and organizing them to make a full-blown, quasi-legal case for the view that boys, en masse, are being repressed by an alien regime. She talks about the kid who was suspended for kissing a girl in school, and about boys forced to study exclusively female figures in an American history class. She describes boys brainwashed into believing myths about their own inborn turpitude: It comes with the testosterone.

One of the best Sommers horror stories is about the hugger:

In [an] unpublicized case, a mother in Worcester, Massachusetts, who came to pick up her son was told that he had been reprimanded and made to sit in the “time-out” chair for having hugged another child. “He's a toucher,” she was told. “We are not going to put up with it.” That little boy was three years old.

The tales of “Son's Day” and the hugger, and the other stories that Sommers picks off TV news and from the daily papers, often make The War against Boys, seem like a pure artifact of the way we live now. But in another of its dimensions, this book is very old-fashioned. For Sommers assumes that she knows something that probably no one can know, or at least that many people gave up claiming to know thirty years ago. For her, the old gender wisdom pretty much holds: Boys are active, aggressive, outgoing; girls are inclined to be quiet, nurturing, restrained.

Sommers has recourse to some standard research findings to buttress her views: Boys are better at spatial reasoning (a little); girls are more verbal; male and female brain structures look, to some scientists, rather different; boys have more testosterone, girls estrogen, etc., etc. From this, much follows. “There will always be far more women than men who want to stay home with the children,” Sommers avers. (Always? Far more?)

One has heard the purportedly scientific evidence for these views before, and though it's surely suggestive, it's hardly clinching. How many times in the past has science followed, mistakenly, in the ruts of this or that social dogma? The history of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century “scientific” investigations into race—which almost inevitably affirmed the inferiority of all nonwhite people and endorsed their need to be guided, enlightened, colonized, converted, what have you—should put us on guard.

What's going on in Sommers' book, beneath all the protests on behalf of masculinity and all the antifeminist invective? This is actually another installment in the old nature/nurture wars. Both sides, Sommers and her antagonists, have taken extreme positions. Both sides are attempting to turn back the social clock, trying to sabotage an ongoing, painful and very promising gender revolution.

Sommers suggests that she knows what real boys and real girls are at their biological core—she thinks she has a direct line to nature. The feminists she detests (for the most part, she's vague when it comes to naming them) are similarly smug. They know that it's all a matter of nurture. They think biology barely matters. They're prone to believe that if you socialize a boy as you would a girl, well, what you'll have is a biological male who behaves like a female in every significant way. (And wouldn't that be lovely?) Sommers has a splendid time deflating this kind of thinking; some of her best pages jump with invective against the nurture/nurture crowd.

Sommers takes pains to document the deep investment that the Education Department has in the all-nurture side of the question. She notes how the Women's Educational Equity Act Publishing Center (which is the national resource center for “gender-fair materials,” maintained by the Education Department) has declared, “We know that biological, psychological, and intellectual differences between males and females are minimal during early childhood. Nevertheless, in our society we tend to socialize children in different ways that serve to emphasize gender-based differences.”

It's wobbly lobs like this that Sommers delights in smashing back over the net: “In fact,” she virtually hollers, “‘we know’ no such thing.” Hard science—she's quite right—simply hasn't gotten us to such a point, assuming it ever could.

A few pages later, Sommers homes in on a researcher named Elizabeth Debold, who “firmly believes that so-called male behaviors—roughhousing and aggressive competition—are not natural but artifacts of culture.” To Debold, superheroes and macho toys cause boys “to be angry and act aggressive.” No testosterone involved. Debold reports on 3- and 4-year-old boys who delight in a good, bracing game of house until the sorry moment when “peer socialization and media images kick in.” Sommers goes on to quote the feminist philosopher Sandra Lee Bartky as saying that human beings are born bisexual into a patriarchal society and then, through conditioning, are “transformed into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey.”

But the real dragon in Sommers' bestiary is Carol Gilligan, author, most famously, of In a Different Voice. It was Gilligan who, in that 1982 volume, protested the ways that girls were being socialized. She claimed that their desires for community and connectedness were being systematically denigrated by educators and psychologists. The abiding ideal was the male wish for autonomy and independence. No one was listening to the “different voice” in which girls expressed their own, often quite admirable, morality. After Gilligan, Sommers claims, everyone turned away from the boys and began spending all their time nurturing girls—and there the problems began. Sommers dislikes Gilligan so much that occasionally she shoves her onto the nurture side of the debate, where by and large Gilligan doesn't belong. Gilligan, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in an influential—and biting—essay on her work, is basically a Rousseauian. She seems to believe that girls have a nature, an inborn need for community and attachment, that it's good (very good indeed) and that society squelches it. It's not that the nurture camp is underpopulated—Debold, Bartky and the Education Department gang represent a real trend. It's just that Gilligan, whatever shortcomings she may have, doesn't really belong in the clammy cell into which Sommers is determined to thrust her.

What follows from the idea that nurture is all, Sommers says, “is the notion that what society has constructed amiss can be torn down and reconstructed—in the right way. It is assumed that, at bottom, we are all essentially androgynous.” The word “essentially” has a bad odor in intellectual discourse now; we're perpetually cautioned against declaring that we know the “essential” nature of the text, the individual, the culture. And that, from my pragmatic, Emersonian perspective, is all to the good.

But Sommers is a literalist herself, an essentializer in her own right—she just works the other side of the street. Rather than assuming that we're all essentially androgynous, she tends to assume that we're each essentially male or essentially female.

In fact, many people pushed away both these literal ways of thinking some time ago—and not without reason. Part of the sixties rebellion, part of feminism at its best, was a rejection of sexual stereotypes. Men were no longer going to be compelled to conform to the box-shouldered gray-flannel-suit norm. Women weren't going to be ladies—at least not under duress.

And so childrearing had to change. The idea, put simply, was to wait and see. You brought out traditional boys' and girls' toys, put them in front of the child and watched. What does he respond to? What gets her going? When the little boy grabs Barbie by the legs, bends her at the waist and begins shooting, you can only smile. But it doesn't always happen that way, not at all. Lots of boys like to sing, dance and act to the exclusion of nearly all else (my 8-year-old is one such); plenty of girls will be pleased to fire the soccer ball in the general direction of their opponent's kisser, hoping if not for breakage or blood then at least for a pleasant-sounding smack.

The hypothesis that took hold in the sixties was that the identity of the individual might come before her or his gender identity. A person wasn't pre-eminently male or female, M or F, but a range of possibilities, informed, but not determined, by gender. People no longer had to subordinate themselves to stereotypes against their will. We were going to hold the notion of “real boys” and “real girls” at arm's length, put those generalities a few steps in abeyance and see what would develop.

When I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, the schoolyard seemed to have room for only three types of boys: There were the bullying alphas; the betas who followed them around, performing rituals of submission, exposing their necks and ducking their heads on cue; and then there was group three, “the faggots.” Now more boys seem willing to go their own ways, take their satisfaction and status from a range of things: their computers, their pets, their books, their skill with a pencil, their fluency with jokes.

What the women's movement and the sixties rebellion have begotten is a sort of public Romanticism. That is, we took a collective step toward the belief that people could make themselves without conforming to pre-established standards (though without ignoring those standards, either), and that by doing so they would be better—freer, more interesting, more creative, happier.

This Romantic urge for self-reinvention can have strange results. On the individual level, it's often a weird thing to behold. The doctor living down the street, who's been a lifelong traditionalist, a stone allopath, suddenly gets tired of pushing “poison” on her patients and heads for New Mexico, there to study an arcane herbalism from native medicine men. She leaves her husband distraught and her colleagues muttering about menopause and midlife crisis. Out in New Mexico, the doctor's behavior is anything but beyond reproach. After a time, though, if all goes well, she takes what she's learned and merges it with the best of her former self, and perhaps goes back home a healer of enlarged prowess.

A process like this is guaranteed to be tumultuous. Now conceive the chaos that's got to ensue when a whole society takes the plunge into self-remaking. Because that is exactly what American culture has done in the past quarter-century. Many of us have called into question—not forgotten, not denied, but questioned—all the old assumptions about gender that we grew up with. We've backed off, given kids more choices.

Plenty of bad things have gone down, to be sure. The confusion that's come in the wake of the gender rebellion has produced lots of horror stories. Some boys have seen the new freedom, got scared and retreated to the macho grunt-and-clobber style. Some girls, weaned on resentful brands of feminism, have grown rancorous and blamed the patriarchy for every rotten personal choice they have made. And sometimes things get so weird one wonders if it might not be better to go back to a world in which we had unified expectations for all boys and all girls, where we acted as if we knew their essence and treated them accordingly. As a parent, I can see the advantages: Ah, yes, a boy: I know what to expect. We can raise the kid right.

Books about boys and their crises and girls and theirs—despite their professed aims—often have a covert appeal. People buy them to find out just what they have on their hands—what defines a boy, what defines a girl. Or, if they're reading a member of the nurture/nurture crowd, to learn that nothing defines them by nature and that all the shaping is up to parents. The experts want to deliver us from the current questioning—where we're not really sure how much is nature and how much is nurture—and bring us back to an earlier day. They want to make life literal again.

Sommers and the nurture/nurture feminists she rails against may not like each other much, but they're sisters under the skin. They are conservatives in a time of quiet, ongoing rebellion. They want to shut out indeterminacy and replace it with Truth.

There's something about certain social scientists—and all of us are probably infected in some measure with this malady—that cannot bear being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, as that arch-self-maker John Keats put it. They want the truth and they want it now. They take us away from rich confusion, give us the answers.

It's also probably true that current media culture gives grinding, one-idea books like Sommers' more prominence and cultural influence than they deserve. To hit the talk-show circuit, to get on the news, to generate buzz with a social-crit-type book, you need a thesis that can be spit out in under five seconds flat: There's a war against boys! To the barricades before it's too late! Hard-working, smart writers like Sommers have ever more pressure on them to write fat, knowing books that seem encyclopedic in their range but actually have theses so small one could lose them in a watch pocket. Subtler, more careful studies, in which the author feels free from time to time to shrug and say “We don't know,” “We're not sure,” get shoved aside.

How do boys learn best? Sommers, knowing what she knows, can tell you. They need lots of information, lots of memorizing, plenty of facts, traditional schooling, if you please. Sometimes, it seems, social scientists envision the kind of society they want—in this case, one in which there's more respect for facts, more obeisance to authority—then design a story about human nature, highly scientific, of course, to fit that vision to a T.

In fact, a lot of current childrearing resembles a sloppy, loving dialogue. You offer your child various possibilities, enforce various rules. Then you watch the results. Is he happier, smarter, wiser? But you're also cautious: You suspect that he may have a nature—maybe even a nature based on his gender—and you take pains not to outrage it. You steer a course, in other words, between the two belief systems. And the effects of this course-steering can be genuinely freeing. I remember how my 10-year-old heart swelled when a teacher looked at my skinned knees and bruised face and declared me “all boy.” My own sons—and most of their friends—would pull a look of cartoon puzzlement at that accolade. All to the good.

What a literalist like Sommers usefully reminds us of is how badly this grand experiment could go awry. For if nature does insist that the boy be aggressive, and he bottles it up, we don't need a psychoanalyst to tell us that there will be a cost down the line. And if we raise a little girl to conquer the world, when what her nature really demands is that she bank feathers in a comfy nest, then she'll no doubt suffer a more than common unhappiness. The result of too many choices, too open a field, can be fright, confusion, rage. The French Revolution convulsed its way back toward tyranny when it seemed suddenly that too much was up for grabs. In the gender revolution, a great deal now is indeterminate, and it makes us uneasy. We may well be collectively flying in the face of nature.

But almost every dramatic gain for civilization has occurred when people challenged what previous generations took to be the natural order of things—whether it was the rule of the aristocracy or the supremacy of the white race. In the future, old assumptions about nature and gender will probably look the way essays on the divine rights of aristocrats or treatises on the inferior brain structure of dark-skinned peoples do now.

Sommers wants the quiet, complex gender revolution to stop. She's here with all the answers, all the facts. And people will no doubt pause for a bit, mull the old truths over, give them their due. But the gender revolution has opened up too many possibilities for most of us to give up now. Conservatives like Sommers and the all-nurture feminists, supposed experts, are going to have to look on from the sidelines while the amateurs, actual parents who never conducted a survey or compiled statistics, keep all the rich uncertainties, mysteries, doubts—and hopes—alive.