The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  Ever vigilant for gender stereotypes, the guide warns child care workers to “be wary of charming Mommy Bears . . . wearing little aprons and holding a broom in one hand.”10 And it offers a new second verse for “Jack and Jill,” now with Jill leading a safety-conscious, rough-and-tumble-free adventure:

  Jill and Jack went up the track

  To fetch the pail again.

  They climbed with care,

  Got safely there

  And finished the job they began.11

  This government-sponsored day-care guide also urges teachers to carefully monitor children’s fantasy play: “Watch your children at play. Are stereotypes present in the fantasies and situations they act out? Intervene to set the record straight. ‘Why don’t you be the doctor, Amy, and you the nurse, Billy?’ ”12 The purpose of these interventions is described expansively: “Unless we practice nonsexist child-rearing, we cannot fulfill our dreams of equality for all people.”13

  William’s Doll

  Boys do not always cooperate with efforts to rescue them from their masculinity. Sometimes they openly rebel. In their 1994 book Failing at Fairness, education scholars Myra and David Sadker describe a fourth-grade class in Maryland in which the teacher worked with the boys to help them “push the borders of the male stereotype.”14 She asked them to imagine themselves as authors of an advice column in their local newspaper. One day they received the following letter:

  Dear Adviser:

  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 it normal, or is my son sick? Please help!

  The nine-year-old “advisers” were unsympathetic to the boy. The teacher then read aloud from a popular feminist book, William’s Doll. It is a story about a boy who wants a doll “to hug it and cradle it in his arms.”15 His father refused and tried instead to interest him in a basketball or in an electric train. But William persisted in wanting the doll. When the grandmother arrived, she gently scolded the father for thwarting William’s wish. She took William to the store and bought him “a baby doll with curly eyelashes, and a long white dress with a bonnet.” William “loved it right away.”

  The story did little to change the fourth graders’ minds. According to the Sadkers, “Their reaction was so hostile that the teacher had trouble keeping order.”16 A few reluctantly agreed that the boy could have a doll—but only if it were a G.I. Joe. The Sadkers were surprised that boys so young could be so inflexibly traditional. “As we observed her lesson, we were struck by how much effort it took to stretch outmoded attitudes.”

  William’s Doll has been made into a play. Boston University professor Glenn Loury tells about sitting through a production at his son’s elementary school in Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1998. Loury, the father of two boys—one starring in the play—was not impressed: “First of all, what is wrong with wanting your boy not to play with a doll but to play ball? There is nothing that needs to be fixed there.”17 Loury was speaking for many fathers and mothers. However, his voice and sensibility seemed to count for naught with the resocializers.

  Shaping the gender identities of schoolchildren was a heady enterprise. And it was inspired and informed by the scholars in some of our leading universities. Preeminent among them was Carol Gilligan. Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard School of Education saw themselves leading a profound revolution that would change the way society constructs young males and females. Once children were freed of oppressive gender roles, Gilligan predicted a change in their play preferences. She and her associate Elizabeth Debold firmly believed that so-called male behaviors—roughhousing and aggressive competition—are not natural but are artifacts of culture. Superheroes and macho toys, they said, “cause boys to be angry and aggressive.” Debold reported on their studies of three- and four-year-old boys who “are comfortable playing house or dress-up with girls, and in assuming nurturing roles in play.” Unfortunately, as they saw it, boys’ interest in playing dress-up with the girls is rarely encouraged or sustained. “By kindergarten, peer socialization and media images kick in.”18

  The gender reformers at Wellesley, the Department of Education, and Harvard helped shape attitudes and policy in schools throughout the country. They were convinced that breaking down male stereotypes, starting in preschool, was good for society. Whether it was good for the boys never came up. In classrooms across the country little boys got the message that there was something wrong with them—something the teacher was trying to change.

  It is doubtful that these efforts at resocialization were ever successful. But they surely succeeded in making lots of little boys confused and unhappy. Questions abound. What sort of credentials do the critics of masculinity bring to their project of reconstructing the nation’s schoolboys? How well do they understand and like boys? Who has authorized their mission? To better understand the logic and motives of the resocializers, it is helpful to consider the arguments of a contemporary gender theorist.

  The World According to Virginia Valian

  Virginia Valian, a professor of psychology at Hunter College, is one of the most frequently cited authorities on gender schemas and how to change them.19 She is also a leading light in the National Science Foundation’s gender equity campaign ADVANCE.20 With the help of a $3.9 million National Science Foundation grant, she and her colleagues established the Hunter College Gender Equity Project, where they have developed tutorials on gender role transformation.21 Her 1998 book, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women explains the urgency of that mission:

  In white, Western middle-class society, the gender schema for men includes being capable of independent, autonomous action . . . [and being] assertive, instrumental, and task-oriented. Men act. The gender schema for women is different; it includes being nurturant, expressive, communal, and concerned about others.22

  Our society, says Valian, pressures women to indulge their nurturing propensities while it encourages men to develop “a strong commitment to earning and prestige, great dedication to the job, and an intense desire for achievement.”23 Such gender role socialization, she says, exacts a high toll on women and confers an unfair advantage on men.

  To achieve a gender-fair society, Valian advocates a concerted attack on conventional schemas. Changing how parents interact with children is at the top of her list. For example, says Valian, there is a widespread assumption that women are better with babies than men. Where did that come from? The commonsense answer is that women’s special affinity for babies is a powerful, universal, time-immemorial biological instinct. But Valian dismisses such explanations and cites a large body of research showing how parents and other adults aid and abet children’s preferences and propensities.

  Valian describes a study in which fathers are placed in rooms with their one-year-old sons or daughters. “On the shelf, within the babies’ sight but out of reach were two dolls, two trucks, a toy vacuum cleaner and a shovel.” What does the father do? Over and over again, fathers were observed giving their sons a truck twice as often as they gave them a doll.24 (They gave daughters dolls and trucks at similar rates.) She mentions another study in which parents appear to reward children for choosing sex-appropriate toys. Valian concludes, “It appears that [parents] want their children . . . to conform to gender norms.” And, according to Valian, those norms inhibit a child’s potential to flourish later in life.

  As things stand, children learn to enjoy only half of what is potentially open to them, the half adults give them access to. Girls learn to take pleasure in being nurturant, boys learn to take pleasure in physical skills. Girls’ increasing interest in sports shows how quickly some of them acquire a taste for physical activity. We have yet to provide boys with a parallel opportunity for nurturance.25

  In the closing sentences of Why So Slow?, Valian says, “Egalitarian parents can bring up their children so that both boys and girls play with dolls and trucks. . . . From the standpoint of equality, nothing is more important.”26

 
From the standpoint of reality, nothing seems more unlikely. Most little girls don’t want to play with trucks, as almost any parent can attest. Including me: when my son gave his daughter Eliza a toy train, she placed it in a baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some sleep.

  Valian has heard this sort of objection many times, and she has an answer. She does not deny that sex differences have some foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and effect. Even if Eliza is prompted by nature to interact with the train in a stereotypical female way, that is no reason for her father not to energetically correct her behavior. “We don’t,” says Valian, “accept biology as destiny. . . . We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate. . . . I propose we adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences.”27

  Few would deny that parents and teachers should expose children to a wide range of toys and play activities. And Valian is right when she says that culture can intensify or diminish our natural inclinations. But gender identity is notoriously difficult to change. As one neuroscientist, Lise Eliot, observes, “[I]t is a potent, irreversible piece of self-knowledge that crystalizes children’s perceptions and choice about much in their world, creating pink and blue barriers that parents find difficult to maneuver around.”28 In the hands of little boys, toy baby carriages will be catapulted from the roofs of dollhouses. In the hands of little girls, toy trains will be nurtured. Nothing short of radical and sustained behavior modification could change these elemental play preferences. Is it worth it? Is it even ethical?

  We vaccinate, inoculate, and medicate children against disease. Being a typical little boy or girl is not a pathology in need of a cure. Failure to protect children from smallpox, diphtheria, or measles places them in harm’s way. There is no such harm in allowing male/female differences to flourish in early childhood. The resocializers talk of “gender apartheid,” of the schoolyard as a training ground for incipient batterers, of conventional masculinity as toxic. For Valian, the gender system is a source of massive social injustice. But these are all extravagant exaggerations. These would-be reformers completely ignore or discount all the good achieved by a tolerant policy that allows the sexes to freely pursue their different styles of play. More than that, this movement to change children’s concept of themselves is invasive and authoritarian.

  Gender-variant children (once called “tomboy girls” and “sissy boys” in the medical literature) are a lesson to us all. These children are powerfully drawn to the toys of the opposite sex. They will often persist in playing with the “wrong” toys despite relentless pressure from parents, peers, and doctors. There was a time when a boy who behaved like William in William’s Doll would have been considered mentally ill and subject to behavior modification therapy. Today, we have developed more enlightened and compassionate attitudes. Most experts encourage tolerance, understanding, and acceptance.29 But surely the same tolerance and understanding should extend to the gender identity and preferences of the vast majority of children.

  What If Mother Nature Is Not a Feminist?

  On March 21, 2005, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University hosted a conference entitled Impediments to Change: Revisiting the Women in Science Question. The auditorium in Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard was packed. Dedicated in 1904, the theater has been the site of many a spirited intellectual exchange. But this conference was a forum not for debate but for indignation over (then) Harvard president Lawrence Summers’s speculation that innate differences between the sexes might be one reason there are fewer women than men at the highest echelons of math and science.

  The six panelists—four from Harvard, two from MIT—did not challenge one another in the fashion of typical academic seminars, but rather repeated and reinforced a common conviction that there is only one possible explanation for why fewer women than men teach math and physics at Harvard and MIT: sexist bias. Why were no dissenters invited? Because from the point of view of the assembled, that would be like inviting a flat-earther or a Holocaust denier. One panelist, Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, flatly declared that the case against significant inborn cognitive differences “is as conclusive as any finding I know of in science.”30

  For any scholar, especially a Harvard University social scientist, to sweep aside all the evidence for innate differences defies belief. In 2010, David Geary, a University of Missouri psychologist, published Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences. This thorough, fair-minded, and comprehensive survey of the literature includes more than fifty pages of footnotes citing studies by neuroscientists, endocrinologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and psychologists showing a strong biological basis for many gender differences.31 While these particular studies may not be the final word, they cannot be dismissed or ignored.

  Nor can human reality be tossed aside. In all known societies, women have better verbal skills, and men excel at spatial reasoning.32 Women tend to be the nurturers and men the warriors. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points to the absurdity of ascribing these universal differences to socialization: “It would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way.”33 A recent study on sex differences by researchers from the University of Turin and the University of Manchester confirms what most of us see with our eyes: despite some exceptions, women tend to be more sensitive, esthetic, sentimental, intuitive, and tender-minded; while men tend to be more utilitarian, objective, unsentimental, and tough-minded.34 It is true that we do not yet fully understand the precise biological underpinnings of these universal tendencies, but that is no reason to deny they exist. And there are many tantalizing theories.

  Consider, for example, Cambridge University’s Simon Baron-Cohen. He is one of the world’s leading experts on autism, a disorder that affects far more males than females. Individuals with autism tend to be socially disconnected and unaware of the emotional states of others. But they often exhibit obsessive fixation on objects and machines. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm, or the “extreme male brain.” He believes that men are, “on average,” wired to be better “systematizers” and women to be better “empathizers.”35 It is a daring claim—but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in both girls and boys from infancy into grade school.

  It is hard not to be attracted to theories like Simon Baron-Cohen’s when one looks at the way children play and how men and women are distributed in the workplace. After two major waves of feminism, women still predominate—sometimes overwhelmingly—in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education,36 social work,37 nursing,38 and psychology39; while men are overrepresented in the “systematizing” vocations such as car repair,40 oil drilling,41 and electrical engineering.42 And there are no signs that boys are going to surrender their trucks, rockets, and weapons for glittery lavender ponies anytime soon.

  Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser has what seems to be the appropriate attitude about the research on sex differences: respectful, intrigued but also cautious. When asked about Baron-Cohen’s work, Hauser said, “I am sympathetic . . . and find it odd that anyone would consider the work controversial.”43 Hauser referred to research that shows, for example, that if asked to make a drawing, little girls almost always create scenes with at least one person, while males nearly always draw things—cars, rockets, or trucks. And he mentioned that among primates—including our closest relations, the chimpanzees—males are more technologically innovative, while females are more involved in details of family life. Still, Hauser warns that a lot of seemingly exciting and promising research on sex differences has not panned out and urges us to treat the biological theories with caution.44

  Clearly, gender differences are driven by some yet-to-be understood interaction between culture and biology. And we must always bear in mind that no one is claiming that all men
and women embody the tendencies of their sexes: some girls have superb spatial reasoning skills and little interest in nurturing, while some males reject rough-and-tumble play and prefer calm, imaginative games. When we speak of gender differences, we are referring to statistical differences between groups, not the rigid determination of individuals. If we say, for example, that women tend to enjoy romance novels more than men do, we are not saying that all women enjoy them. Hauser is right that we need to proceed with care.

  But where is that care where the social constructionists are concerned? Though their research appears to be going nowhere, they are still marching ahead with their workshops, curriculum guides, and tutorials. Confident in their theories, they have taken on the task of resocializing the American child.

  Ms. Logan’s Classroom

  There is much to be learned from classrooms where teachers are actively attacking the schemas of their pupils. Peggy Orenstein’s SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap was written in association with the American Association of University Women.45 Just after the AAUW had alerted the country to the plight of its shortchanged adolescent girls, Orenstein visited several middle schools to see firsthand how they were coping with the “confidence gap.” As a trusted insider, Orenstein was given full access to classrooms that were “raising the gender consciousness” of students. From her detailed report, we get a good understanding of how the new gender-fair activists view boys and what they have in mind for them.