April 2001 Print

TITLE: THE WAR AGAINST BOYS (252PP.)

AUTHOR: Christina Hoff Sommers

PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster ($25)

REVIEWER: Dr. Peter Chojnowski

SUMMARY: "The problem with boys is that they are boys, say the experts. We need to change their nature. We have to make them more like...girls" (from the dustjacket). This fascinating book analyzes the work of the leading academic experts and shows their lack of scientific rigor and how they are motivated by the feminist ideology.

Anyone familiar with the current state of North American academia will readily recognize how this apparently old mistrust of and animosity towards males, and anything smacking of traditional expressions of masculinity, has come to dominate the well-subsidized establishment intellectuals in the United States. It was only after reading Christina Hoff Sommers' well-publicized book The War Against Boys, however, that I realized how well-subsidized these "researchers" are. The purpose of all the "research" which is being done, and has been done in the last seven years or so, is clear. It is to prove that young females are "victims" of a misogynist culture and educational system which would "force" them into assuming roles and attitudes which will insure their perpetual subservience to men. What the Feminists wish to prove with their research is that our not yet overturned patriarchic culture is engendering, within the context of the public education system, attitudes of inferiority and passivity in women, while encouraging the kind of aggressive, domineering behavior which can only lead to violence, primarily manifesting itself as sexual harassment of women. The atmosphere of suspicion and animosity can sometimes reach the level of an irrational frenzy as Mrs. Sommers indicates in her book. The most egregious example mentioned occurred at Glebe Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, in the year 1997. A nine year old boy was accused of deliberately rubbing up against a girl in the cafeteria line. School officials, expectedly, notified the police. The boy was charged with aggravated sexual battery and was handcuffed and fingerprinted. The family's lawyer, Kenneth Rosenau, said, "This is really a case of political correctness run amok. A nine year old bumps into a girl in the lunch line while reaching for an apple and all of a sudden you've got World War III declared against a 4th grader."¹ After much litigation, the charges were dropped.

This sexually and legally charged atmosphere, which is found even in American elementary schools, is a real life consequence of a trend in literary "victimology," which is currently dominating all discussions concerning American pedagogy. The "victim" is always the female growing up and being educated in an environment which is shaped by barely controlled male aggressiveness. Sommers cites several examples of this concerted attempt on the part of Feminists to paint the present condition of young girls as one of exploitation and unfulfilled dreams. Novelist Carolyn See wrote in the Washington Post: "The most heroic, fearless, graceful, tortured human beings in this land must be girls from the ages of 12 to 15."² The most successful book of this "girl crisis" genre is Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher. In it, we find out that the American female teen is no sooner reaching adolescence than meeting her own fiery demise: "Something dramatic happens to girls in early adolescence. Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves. They crash and burn."³ This propaganda war to convince the American public and government that girls need to be placed in the "underserved" and "victimized" category has had its effects. In 1994, the US Congress passed the Gender Equity in Education Act, in which girls were described as part of the "underserved population" on a par with other "discriminated against minorities." This characterization allowed millions of dollars worth of grants to be awarded to study the "plight" of girls and to teach them how to "cope with" the insidious bias against them.⁴ This national attention soon was projected onto the international stage when the American delegation to the 1995 Fourth United Nations Conference on Woman, held in Beijing, presented the educational and psychological deficits of American girls to be a pressing human rights issue.⁵

The problem with this politically correct girl victimology is that it is not at all substantiated by the statistics of the same government that helped finance the Beijing conference. In fact, when the relevant statistics are studied concerning the respective educational achievement and involvement of girls and boys, we find that it is the boys, not the girls, who are languishing academically. According to any number of recent studies, including those done by the US Department of Education, girls get better grades and have higher educational aspirations. Girls in high school tend to follow a more rigorous academic program and participate more in the prestigious Advance Placement program.⁶ The feminist myth of the "timid" girl is meeting the reality of the disaffected boy who is willing to settle for mediocrity. Girls currently outnumber boys in student government, in honor societies, on school newspapers, and even in debating clubs.⁷ Moreover, girls read more books,⁸ girls outperform boys on tests of artistic and musical ability,⁹ and fewer girls are suspended from school, are held back, or drop out.¹⁰ More consequentially, more boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs.¹¹ According to the statistics, the place where the boys still dominate the teen-age scene is in sports.¹² This advantage is, needless to say, causing the Feminists to target the "sports gap" with a vengeance.

Even with all this contemporary female dominance of the academic scene, we still find ourselves confronted with another interesting statistic. Males continue to out score females in all high-stakes admissions test, such as the SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) given to college bound high school seniors, along with all professional graduate school exams, such as those for law school, medical school, and for those for graduate school in general.¹³ The question then arises as to why it is the case that this raw academic and intellectual potential, which is what is tested in these entrance exams, is not manifested in real life academic performance. Although, Christina Sommers broaches the topic when she writes about the all-male classes currently being established in Great Britain, she does not ask the more searching questions which would seek out the reasons why a liberal society, so encouraging of feminism, should stultify basic male potential. A potential that still reveals itself fully on the sports fields and courts. Is there something about sports which unleashes a more natural male milieu, one that liberal society has committed itself to extinguish? In fact, is it precisely such a milieu which liberal society wants to eliminate? One is lead to believe so, if we simply consider the most recent US Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of single sex education. In the 1996 case, United States v. Virginia, the Supreme Court ruled that Virginia Military Institute was violating the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by excluding women.¹⁴ This ruling was a deathblow to same-sex education for boys. Interesting enough and, seemingly contrary to the leftist ideological mantra of "equal justice and opportunity," it did not, in any way, affect same sex education for girls. In the majority opinion, written by justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court retained full protection for any female-only programs that could be said to "compensate for the disabilities women suffer." She writes,

Sex classifications may be used to compensate women "for particular economic disabilities [they have] suffered," "to promote equal employment opportunity," and to advance the full development of the talent and capacity of our Nation's people. But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, to create and perpetuate the legal, social, and economic inferiority of women.¹⁵

By allowing, and even pointing out the educational benefits of single sex education, the feminist-influenced ruling tacitly identifies the lived reality, ubiquitous in the past, which it has now become the task of the liberal constitutional order to eliminate.

Sommers' book does much to document the governmental and academic assault on any remaining vestiges of masculinity, which may exist in the souls of our contemporary boys. How our culture binds boys in a "straightjacket of masculinity" has suddenly become a fashionable topic.¹⁶

The "gender theorists" and activists have, until recently, ignored the topic of boys and their educational and social situation; however, they have recently begun to tell us that boys, too, need attention. The reason is not one shaped by current statistical reality, but rather, by ideological prejudice and blindness. The reason boys deserve our attention, say the "gender experts" at Harvard, Wellesley, and Tufts Universities, is that, "under patriarchy," males are socialized to "destructive masculine ideals." These "experts" believe that boys and men will remain "sexist," and potentially dangerous, unless socialized away from conventional maleness. Since it is "too late" to change the way adult men think and behave, the target of the "men-should-be-like­women" camp are boys. They are still "salvageable," provided that one gets to them at an early age.¹⁷ The feminist analysis, which understands boys as being wrongly masculinized, is fomenting a movement to "construct boyhood" in ways that will render them less competitive, more emotionally expressive, and more nurturing. More, in short, like girls.¹⁸ As Gloria Steinem stated, "We need to raise boys like we raise girls."¹⁹

The most prominent name in the implementation of this educational and cultural agenda is Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her main concern has been the "problem" of "boys' masculinity...in a patriarchal social order."²⁰ The main outlines of this agenda have been clearly articulated by Barney Brawer, director of the Boys Project at Tufts University, when he told Education Week:"We've deconstructed the old version of manhood, but we've not [yet] constructed a new version."²¹ In the spring of 2000, the Boys' Project at Tufts offered five workshops on "Reinventing Boyhood." The planners promised "emotionally exciting sessions. We'll laugh and cry, argue, and agree, reclaim and sustain the best parts of the culture of boys and men, while figuring out how to change the terrible parts."²²

Rather than being merely a topical concern in academic circles, the attempt to restructure the male psyche by stripping it of its uniquely masculine elements is always taking on new forms. Just as the American military has, within the last ten years, become the lab for much of the government's experimental reconstructions of human society, so too the public school at both the elementary and secondary level. One of the traits of the masculine character which the liberal academic and bureaucrat finds obnoxious is the masculine desire to excel, to prove itself as superior and dominant before others, to constantly mentally construct his environment in accord with a perceived or desired hierarchical order. That is, men always instinctively desire to live in a mental environment in which a "pecking order" is clearly delineated. I believe this instinctive assertion of a "pecking order" is one of the attractions behind sports. The winners and losers are clear. The respective excellence of each player is known to all. Some are "out" and some are "in." The I am special, you are special, and we are all equal is stultifying to the male soul and, no doubt, a big part of the reason for the more disordered outbreaks of violence in our own time. In the gang, there is a "pecking order," there is initiation, command, hierarchy, and discipline. This obvious, yet intentionally overlooked fact, is verified by recent cross-cultural studies. Boys are more bellicose than girls. The classic study of male­female differences was done in 1973 by researchers Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin. They concluded (and one has to wonder how much money was spent on this research) that, compared to girls, boys engage in more mock fighting and more aggressive fantasies. They insult and hit one another and retaliate more quickly when attacked: "The sex differences [in aggression] is found as early as social play begins - at 2 or 2fi."²³ Sommers herself describes the reaction of the "equity specialists" to these statistical findings: "The 'equity specialists' look at these insulting, hitting, chasing, competitive creatures, and see them [boys] as proto-criminals.²⁴ One of the few dissenting voices in the universal condemnation of "boys being boys," is writer Camille Paglia who states that, male aggressiveness and competitiveness are animating principles of creativity: "Masculinity is aggressive, unstable, combustible. It is also the most creative cultural force in history."²⁵

Paglia's voice is that of a distinct minority. As we will see with the government sponsored Quit It! program, this aggressiveness on the part of boys, who will one day be men, is considered to be that which is most dangerous for the maintenance of the ideal egalitarian society. If boys push, they might push ahead! Every toy manufacturer knows that boys are more interested in confrontation and conflict than they are in amenable social interaction. They have never been able to interest boys in interactive social games which girls love. In the computer game "Talk with Me Barbie," Barbie develops a personal relationship with the player. She (we are speaking here about Barbie, of course) learns her name and chats with her about dating, careers, and playing house. These Barbie games are among the all-time best-selling interactive games.²⁶ Boys, however, will have nothing to do with them.

In order to keep boys from "pushing" and to keep them from "pushing ahead," Feminist academics, working with NEA (National Education Association) and the US Department of Education, have produced a teachers' guide which contains a program of activities designed to render little boys, grades K-3, less volatile, less competitive and less aggressive. The Quit It! program, developed in 1998, promises to develop children's cooperative skills through "wonderful noncompetitive activities."²⁷ One of the more sinister instances of childhood activities is the game of tag. Quit It! shows the teacher how to counteract the subtle influences of TAG that encourage aggressiveness. After the students share their fears and apprehensions about tag, the teacher advises them that there is a new, non-threatening version of the game called "Circle of Friends," where no one is ever "out." Here is how the Quit It! program describes how to play Circle of Friends: "If a tagged student calls for help, two students hold hands and form a circle around her/him. This circle of friends unfreezes the student so he or she can continue playing. Students can't be tagged while making a circle." Should students become overexcited by Circle of Friends, the guide suggests that once back in the classroom the teacher use "stress relief exercises to help the transition from active play to focused work."²⁸   If students should experience anger during playtime, the Quit It! guide provides teachers with "tools for organizing an in class anger management workshop." We are also informed that "Outlets for angry feelings can be expressed through puppets, role-plays, dramatizations, drawing, dictating, or writing."²⁹ Quit It! was funded by the Department of Education and, according to the website of the National Education Association, it is a best seller among teachers.³⁰

This drive to enervate the masculine personality of boys by introducing forms of play which de­emphasize competition, hierarchy, and aggressiveness, is complemented by an attempt to make male perception and affectivity similar to that of a female. Sommers mentions one such notable example, which directly concerns a popular Feminist book, William's Doll. In their 1994 book, Failing at Fairness, Feminist researchers Myra and David Sadker describe a 4th grade class in Maryland in which the teacher worked with the boys in her class to help them "push the borders of the male stereotype."³¹ One class period, the teacher asked the boys in her class to imagine themselves as authors of an advice column in their local newspaper. One day, they received the following letter: "Dear Advisor, My seven year old son wants me to buy him a doll. I don't know what to do. Should I go ahead and get it for him? Is this normal, or is my son sick? Please help!" According to the Sadkers, the nine year old "advice columnists" were extremely unsympathetic to the boy. The teacher's solution to this obvious manifestation of "sexist child rearing," was to read aloud from the book William's Doll. This story concerns a boy who wants a doll "to hug it and cradle it in his arms."³² His father refuses to buy him this doll and, instead, tries to interest him in a basketball or an electric train. William, however, persists in wanting the doll. When William's grandmother arrives, she gently scolds the father for thwarting William's wish. She takes William to the store and buys him "a boy doll with curly eyelashes, and a long white dress with a bonnet."³³ William loved it right away.

Surprisingly enough, the story did little to change the 4th graders' minds. According to the Sadkers, "Their reaction was so hostile, that the teacher had trouble keeping order."³⁴ A few of the boys reluctantly agreed that William could have a doll - but only if it was a G.I. Joe! As Nietzsche once said, you cannot drive out nature, not even with a pitchfork!

After such a critique of the bureaucratic and academic tampering with the basics of human psychology, one would be led to believe that Mrs. Sommers would have as her guiding vision an understanding of the lunacy of egalitarianism and sameness, especially when it comes to the two sexes. Rather than being someone fundamentally opposed to the trends she cites so well, Sommers simply indicates that the problems she has sighted are misguided attempts to unfairly tilt the legal and social equilibrium which exists between the sexes in a liberal society towards girls, their persons and their psychology. Boys are being treated "unfairly" and "unequally." She does not even ask the question, "Should men and women have fundamentally different roles in human society?" Or, do these different roles, and the different psychological states that necessitate this distinction, require that boys and girls be educated in distinctly different ways. Moreover, will the woman who wrote The Betrayal of Feminism acknowledge that by its very nature and intent it has produced the academic nonsense which she so well describes. Could there be something wrong with liberal society itself, which will not stop until all fundamentals of nature and civilization are undermined and negated? For Sommers, the answer is no. Her solutions, therefore, are not real solutions. Nor do they indicate a real searching understanding of the basic problem. We find this in the following two quotations, in which she gives her critique of the Feminist programs she considers:

The kind of equality of the sexes most Americans embrace and hold dear is the equality demanded by the founders of the women's movement in the mid-1800s: for women and men to be equal before the law and to be allowed the same freedoms, privileges, and rights.

We will be on the road to genuine fairness when school boards, principals, and teachers begin to focus in an objective way on the moral and cognitive development of all the children in their care. Children and teenagers need strong moral guidance. They need firm codes of discipline in a school environment that does not tolerate egregious meanness or gross incivility, whether sexual or non­sexual. They do not need divisive sexual politics, court judgments, and school policies that bear down hard on boys.³⁵

Such are the desires of a liberal and feminist who will not fully recognize the logical consequences of the ideas she holds. What is completely lacking in this analysis and negative critique of recent Feminist attempts to "make boys more like girls," is the acknowledgement that boys, as such, are called to leadership roles that are unique to their sex. Such roles require a certain type of education, an education that must be distinctly different from that of girls. Yes, boys are more bellicose, but how does this difference in temperament and subsequent behavior shape our understanding of the distinct role which males must have in human society if it is to function in a rational and humane way? Mrs. Sommers believes that there can be some social and educational "middle way," which avoids any hint of a non-egalitarian traditional society and, yet, does not pursue all of the "possibilities" for leveling inherent in the revolutionary dynamic operative for the last 200 years. What we should truly see in the statistics indicating the current inferior performance of boys as compared to girls is the effects of a liberal society on the fundamentals of a male's psyche. When we find in the Politics of Aristotle, that the distinction between male and female roles in the family is one of the foundational aspects of all human society, both primitive and advanced, we can understand somewhat the tenuous position of our own counter-natural society and body politic. Let us create a society in which boys can be boys, girls can be girls, and one in which this distinction is mirrored in law, customs manners, the military, and economic life.

 

Dr. Peter E. Chojnowski has an undergraduate degree in Political Science and another in Philosophy from Christendom College. He also received his Master's Degree and doctorate in Philosophy from Fordham University. He is the father of four children and teaches for the Society of Saint Pius X at Immaculate Conception Academy, Post Falls, ID.

FOOTNOTES

1. Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), pp.54-55. Cf. Anne Gearan, "Sex Charges Dropped Against 9 Year Old in Lunch Line Bump," Associated Press, June 25, 1997.

2. Sommers, p.18. Cf. Carolyn See, "For Girls Hardest Lesson of All." Washington Post Book World, September 2, 1994, p.19.

3. Sommers, p.18. Cf. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Putnam, 1994), p.19.

4. Sommers, p 23.

5. Ibid.

6. Sommers, p.24. Cf. Department of Education, The Condition of Education (Washington D.C.: US Department of Education, 1998), pp. 68, 70, 206, 238, 262; Carol Dwyer and Linda Johnson, "Grades, Accomplishments, and Correlates," in Gender and Fair Assessment, ed. Warren Willingham and Nancy Cole (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997), pp.127-156. Also see, Higher Education Research Institute, The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1998 (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of California, Los Angeles, 1998), pp.36, 54.

7. Sommers, pp. 24-25. Cf. Higher Education Research Institute, The American Freshman: Twenty-Five Years of Trends (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, University of Los Angeles, 1991), p. 51.

8. Higher Education Research Institute, The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 1998, pp.39,57.

9. National Center for Education Statistics, NAEP 1997Arts Report Card (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 1998).

10. US Department of Education, The Condition of Education 1997 (Washington D.C.: US Department of Education, 1997), p.158.

11. Ibid., p.300.

12. The American Freshman: Twenty-five Year Trends, p.51.

13. On the 1998 SAT, girls' average math score was 496, verbal score 502; boys' average math score was 531, verbal score 509.

14. United States v. Virginia, 116.5 Ct 2264, June 26, 1996.

15. Sommers, p.162.

16. Sommers, p.15.

17. Ibid., p.44.

18. Ibid.

19. Gloria Steinem, "Men, Women, and the Sex Difference," ABC News Special, February 1, 1995.

20. Carol Gilligan, "The Centrality of Relationship in Human Development: A Puzzle, Some Evidence, and a Theory," in Development and Vulnerability in Close Relationships, ed. Gil Noam and Kurt Fischer (Mahwah, NJ: Erbaum, 1996), p.251.

21. Debra Viadero, "Behind the Mask of Masculinity," Education Week, May 13, 1998, p.37.

22. Sommers, p.14.

23. Eleanor Emmons Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences, vol.1(Pablo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974), p.352.

24. Sommers, pp.62-63.

25. Camille Paglia, Sex, Art, and American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1992), p.53.

26. Sommers, p.151. Cf. Leslie Brody and Judith Hall, "Gender and Emotion," in Handbook of Emotions, ed. Michael Lewis and Jeanette Haviland (New York: Guilford, 1993), p.452.

27. Education Equity Concepts and Wellesley College for Research on Women, Quit It: A Teacher's Guide on Teasing and Bullying for Use with Students in Grades K-3 (New York and Wellesley, MA: Educational Equity Concepts and Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, 1998). p.2.

28. Ibid., p.48.

29. Ibid., p.48.

30. Ibid, pp.52-53.

31. Sommers, pp.78-79.

32. Myra and David Sadker, Failing at Fairness: How America's Schools Cheat Girls (New York: Scribners, 1994) p.224.

33. Charlotte Zolotow, William's Doll (New York: HarperCollins, 1972), p.5.

34. Sadker, p.224.

35. Sommers, pp.71, 98.