If men are experiencing the agonies Faludi speaks of, they are doing so with remarkable equanimity. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has been tracking levels of general happiness and life satisfaction since 1957, consistently finds that approximately 90 percent of Americans describe themselves as happy with their lives, with no significant differences between men and women.33 When I asked its survey director, Tom Smith, if there had been any unusual signs of distress among men in the last few decades—the years in which Faludi claims that a generation of men have seen “all their hopes and dreams burn up on the launch pad.”34 Smith replied, “There have been no trends in a negative direction during those years.” But Faludi believes otherwise and joins Gilligan, Pollack, and the others in calling for a “new paradigm” of how to be men.
Faludi cites the work of Dr. Darrel Regier, director of the Division of Epidemiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, to support her thesis that men are increasingly unhappy.35 I asked Dr. Regier what he thought of her men-are-in-distress claim. “I am not sure where she gets her evidence for any substantial rise in male distress.” He was surprised that one of his own 1988 studies was cited by Faludi as evidence for an increase in “anxiety, depressive disorders, suicide.” “Well,” Dr. Regier said, “that is a fallacy. The article shows no such thing.”36 What does he think of these false mental health scares? I asked. “I guess they sell books,” he said.
Apocalyptic alarms about looming mental health disasters do sell well. In a satirical article entitled “A Nation of Nuts,” New York Observer editor Jim Windolf tallied the number of Americans allegedly suffering from some kind of mental disorder. He sent away for brochures and literature of dozens of advocacy agencies and mental health organizations. Then he did the math. “If you believe the statistics,” Windolf reported, “77 percent of America’s adult population is a mess. . . . And we haven’t even thrown in alien abductees, road ragers, and internet addicts.”37 If you factor in Gilligan’s and Pipher’s hapless girls, Pollack’s suffering and dangerous boys, and Faludi’s agonized men, the figure must be very close to 100 percent.
Gilligan, Pipher, Pollack, and Faludi all find abnormality and inner anguish in an outwardly normal and happy population. Each traces the malaise to the “male culture,” which forces harmful gender stereotypes, myths, or “masks” on the population in crisis—women, girls, boys, and men. Girls and women are constrained to be “nice and kind”; boys and men are constrained to be “in control” and emotionally disconnected. Each writer projects an air of sympathy, and of earnest desire to rescue the anguished casualties of our patriarchal culture. But the Gilligan-Pipher-Pollack-Faludi construct creates a serious problem. By taking a small, unhappy minority as representative of an entire group, the writers present the groups themselves as pitiable, incompetent, and unworthy of respect. Pollack, for example, wants to rescue boys from “the myths of boyhood,” but unwittingly harms them by arousing public fear, dismay, and suspicion. In characterizing boys as “Hamlets,” he stigmatizes an entire sex and age group. His seemingly benign project of reconnecting boys to their inner nurturers pressures boys to be more like girls. The effect is to put boys on the defensive—not an incidental effect, as we shall see.
Boys Out of Touch
I have inveighed against the large, extreme, and irresponsible claims of the crisis writers, pointing out that no credible evidence backs them up. What about their more moderate and seemingly reasonable assertions? Gilligan and Pollack speak of boys as hiding their humanity and submerging their sensitivity. They suggest that apparently healthy boys are emotionally repressed and out of touch with their feelings. Is that true?
When my son David was thirteen, he sometimes showed the kind of emotional disengagement that worries the boy reformers. He came to me one evening when he was in the seventh grade, utterly confused by his homework assignment. Like many contemporary English and social studies textbooks, his book, Write Source 2000, was chock-full of exercises designed to improve children’s self-esteem and draw them out emotionally.38 “Mom, what do they want?” David asked. He had read a short story in which one character always compared himself to another. Here are the questions David had to answer:
• Do you often compare yourself with someone?
• Do you compare to make yourself feel better?
• Does your comparison ever make you feel inferior?
Another set of questions asked about profanity in the story:
• How do you feel about [the main character’s] choice of words?
• Do you curse? Why? When? Why not?
• Does cursing make you feel more powerful? Are you feeling a bit uneasy about discussing cursing? Why? Why not?
The Write Source 2000 Teacher’s Guide suggests grading students on a scale from 1 to 10: 10 for a student who is “intensely engaged,” down to a 1 for a student who “does not engage at all.” My son did not engage at all. Here is how he answered:
Do you often compare yourself with someone?
“Sometimes.”
Do you compare to make yourself feel better?
“No. I do not.”
Does your comparison ever make you feel inferior?
“No.”
I was amused by his terse replies. But in the spirit of Gilligan and Pollack, the authors of Write Source 2000 might see them as signs of emotional shutdown. Toy manufacturers know about boys’ reluctance to engage in social interactions. They have never been able to interest boys in the kinds of interactive social games that girls love. In the computer game Talk with Me Barbie, Barbie develops a personal relationship with the player: she learns her name and chats with her about dating, careers, and playing house. These Barbie games are among the all-time bestselling interactive games. But boys don’t buy them.
Males, whether young or old, are on the whole, less interested than females in talking about feelings and personal relationships. In one experiment, researchers at Northeastern University analyzed college students’ conversations at the cafeteria table. They found that young women were far more likely to discuss intimates: close friends, boyfriends, family members. “Specifically,” say the authors, “56 percent of the women’s targets but only 25 percent of the men’s targets were friends and relatives.”39 This is just one study, but it is backed up by massive evidence of distinct male and female interests and preferences.
In another study, boys and girls differed in how they perceived objects and people.40 Researchers simultaneously presented male and female college students with two images on a stereoscope: one of an object, the other of a person. Asked to say what they saw, the male subjects saw the object more often than they saw the person; the female subjects saw the person more often than they saw the object. In addition, dozens of experiments confirm that women are much better than men at judging emotions based on the expression on a stranger’s face.41
These differences have motivated the gender specialists at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Wellesley Center, the Boys’ Project at Tufts, and McLean Hospital’s Center for Men to recommend that we all try to “reconnect” boys. But there is no evidence that boys need what they are offering. Would boys be improved if they were taught to be comfortable playing with Talk with Me Barbie? Are their preferences and attitudes signs of insensitivity and repression, or just innocent and healthy expressions of their inner nature?
If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the characteristic preferences and behaviors of males and females are expressions of innate differences, the differences in emotional styles will be difficult or impossible to eliminate. In any case, why should anyone make it their business to eliminate them?
The gender experts will reply that boys’ relative taciturnity puts them and others in harm’s way; in support they adduce their own research. But that research is flawed. There is no good reason to believe that boys as a group are emotionally endangered; nor is there reason to think that the typical male reticence is some
kind of disorder in need of treatment. In fact, the boy reformers such as Pollack, Gilligan, and their followers need to consider the possibility that male stoicism and reserve may well be traits to be encouraged, not vices or psychological weaknesses to be overcome.
A Plea for Reticence
The argument in favor of saving boys by reconnecting them emotionally rests on the popular assumption that repressing emotions is harmful, while giving discursive vent to them is, on the whole, healthy. Psychologists have recently begun to examine the supposition that speaking out and declaring one’s feelings is better than holding them in. Jane Bybee, a psychologist at Suffolk University in Boston, studied a group of high school students, classifying them as “repressors” (those not focused on their inner states), “sensitizers” (those keenly aware of their moods and feelings), or “intermediates.” She then had the students evaluate themselves and others using these distinctions. She also had the teachers evaluate the students. She found that the “repressors” were less anxious, more confident, and more successful academically and socially. Bybee’s conclusion is tentative: “In our day-to-day behavior it may be good not to be so emotional and needy. The moods of repressed people may be more balanced.”42
In 2012, University of Missouri psychologist Amanda Rose and her coauthors published a study in Child Development that tested the Gilligan/Pollack assumption that boys were fearful and ashamed of sharing their feelings with others.43 Rose and her colleagues surveyed and observed nearly two thousand children and adolescents and found that boys and girls have very different expectations about the value of problem talk. Girls were more likely to report that personal disclosure made them feel cared for and understood. Boys, overall, found it to be a waste of time—and “weird.” Contra Pollack and Gilligan, boys did not feel embarrassed about sharing feelings and were not filled with angst about being ridiculed or teased for being weak or unmasculine. Instead, said the lead author Amanda Rose, “boys’ responses suggest they just don’t see talking about problems to be a particularly useful activity.”44 Rose has sound advice for parents. If you want your son to be more forthcoming, it won’t help to make him feel “safe” about sharing confidence. You will have to persuade him that it serves a practical purpose. As for daughters, she warns, excessive problem talk is linked to anxiety and depression. “So girls should know that talking about problems isn’t the only way to cope.”
It is worth noting that in most past and present societies, “repression” of private feelings has often been regarded as a social virtue. From a historical perspective, the burden of proof rests on those who believe that being openly expressive makes people better and healthier. That view has become a dogma of contemporary American popular culture, but in most cultures—including, until quite recently, our own—reticence and stoicism are regarded as commendable, while the free expression of emotions is often seen as self-centered and immature.
Pollack, who is a champion of emotional expressiveness, instructs parents, “Let boys know that they don’t need to be ‘sturdy oaks.’ ” To encourage boys to be stoical, says Pollack, is to harm them: “The boy is often pushed to ‘act like a man,’ to be the one who is confident and unflinching. No boy should be called upon to be the tough one. No boy should be harmed in this way.”45
But Pollack needs to show, not merely assert, that it harms a child to be “called upon to be tough.” Why shouldn’t boys—or for that matter, girls—try to be sturdy oaks? All of the world’s major religions place stoical control of emotions at the center of their moral teachings. For Buddhists, the ideal is emotional detachment; for Confucianism, dispassionate control. Nor is “Be in touch with your feelings” one of the Ten Commandments. Judeo-Christian teaching enjoins attentiveness to the emotional needs and feelings of others—not one’s own.
The insights of the save-the-male psychologists into the inner world of boys are by no means self-evident; nor is it at all obvious that their emotivist proposals would benefit boys. Boys’ aggressive tendencies do need to be checked. But the boy reformers have not proved that they have the recipe for civilizing boys and restraining their rough natures. Before the gender experts at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the practitioners of the new male psychology are given broad license to reprogram our sons to be “sensitizers” rather than repressors, they should first be required to show that the repairs they are so anxious to make are beneficial and not injurious.
These reform-minded experts should seriously consider the possibility that American children may in fact need more, not less, self-control and less, not more, self-involvement. It may be that American boys don’t need to be more emotional—and that American girls do need to be less sentimental and self-absorbed.
The Culture of Therapy
The British writer and social critic Fay Weldon has coined the useful, if somewhat ungainly, term therapism for the popular doctrine that almost all personal troubles can be cured by talk.46 Weldon is more concerned with therapism as a pop phenomenon than an educational practice; but in either sphere, talk therapy, once primarily a private therapeutic technique, has gone public in ways undreamed of in Sigmund Freud’s philosophy.47
Strangers, proudly in touch with their feelings, share their innermost thoughts and experiences with one another. Talk-show participants make intensely personal disclosures to wildly applauding audiences. The endless stream of confessional memoirs, the self-esteem movement, the textbooks and questionnaires that probe children’s innermost feelings are all manifestations of a profound and rampant therapism.
The contemporary faith in the value of openness and the importance of sharing one’s feelings is now so much a part of popular culture that we find even such staid organizations as the Girl Scouts of America giving patches for being open about grief. Lingua Franca writer Emily Nussbaum reports that “a Girl Scout troop in New York instituted a ‘grief patch’ in 1993—troop members could earn this epaulette by sharing a painful feeling with one another, writing stories and poems about death and loss and meeting with bereavement counselors.”48
One sector in our society has so far been highly resistant to therapism: little boys are no more interested in earning “grief patches” than they are eager to interact personally with dolls. When homework assignments require them to explore their deeper feelings about a text, it is likely that they will not engage. I suspect that efforts to get little boys to be more overtly emotional rarely succeed. But I do not discount the powers of the would-be reformers to wreak a great deal of harm and grief by trying.
All through the 1990s, self-esteem was the education buzzword. Everyone needed it; many demanded it for their children or pupils as a basic human right. But the excesses of those who promoted techniques for increasing students’ self-esteem provide a cautionary example of what can happen when teachers, counselors, and education theorists, armed with good intentions and specious social science (for one thing, no one agrees on what self-esteem is or how to measure it), turn classrooms into encounter groups.
It has never been shown that “high self-esteem” is a good trait for students to possess. Meanwhile, researchers have uncovered a worrisome correlation between inflated self-esteem and juvenile delinquency. As Brad Bushman, an Iowa State University psychologist, explains, “If kids develop unrealistic opinions of themselves and those views are rejected by others, the kids are potentially dangerous.”49
John Hewitt, a University of Massachusetts sociologist, has examined the morality of the self-esteem movement in a fine scholarly book called The Myth of Self-Esteem. Hewitt documents the exponential growth of self-esteem articles and programs from 1982 to 1996.50 He points to the ethical hazards of using the classroom for therapeutic purposes. In a typical classroom self-esteem exercise, students complete sentences beginning “I love myself because . . .” or “I feel bad about myself because . . .” Hewitt explains that children interpret these assignments as demands for self-revelation. They feel pressed to complete the sentences “correctly” in
ways the teacher finds satisfactory. As Hewitt acutely observes, “Teachers . . . no doubt regard the exercises as being in the best interest of their students. . . . Yet from a more skeptical perspective these exercises are subtle instruments of social control. The child must be taught to like himself or herself. . . . The child must confess self-doubt or self-loathing, bringing into light the feelings that he or she might prefer to keep private”51 (emphasis in original).
Far from being harmless, these therapeutic practices are unacceptably prying. Surely school children have a right not to be subjected to the psychological manipulations of both self-esteem educators and the reformers intent on getting boys to disclose their emotions in the way girls often do.
Therapism versus Stoicism
The vast majority of American boys and girls are psychologically healthy. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that they are morally and academically undernourished. Every society confronts the difficult and complex task of civilizing its children, teaching them self-discipline and instilling in them a sense of right and wrong. The problem is old, and the workable solution is known—character education in a sound learning environment. The known, tested solution does not include therapeutic pedagogies.
Children need to be moral more than they need to be in touch with their feelings. They need to be well educated more than they need classroom self-esteem exercises and support groups. Nor are they improved by having their femininity or masculinity “reinvented.” Emotional fixes are not the answer. Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.
American boys do not need to be rescued. They are not pathological. They are not seething with repressed rage or imprisoned in “straitjackets of masculinity.” American girls are not suffering a crisis of confidence; nor are they being silenced by the culture. But when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten our children’s prospects—their moral drift, their cognitive and scholastic deficits—the healers, social reformers, and confidence builders don’t have the answers. On the contrary, they stand in the way of genuine solutions.
The War Against Boys Page 16