The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  Mary Gordon, perhaps the most orthodox and inveterate feminist in this instructive anthology, is another mother with a disarming son. On one occasion, her son David defends his older sister from a bully. “I thought it was really nice of him to stand up for me,” said the sister. For a moment, the mother is also moved by David’s gallantry. “But after a minute, I didn’t want to buy the idea that a woman needs a man to stand up for her.” Gordon says that this incident “expressed for me the complexities of being a feminist mother of a son.”12

  Gordon realizes that she cannot be fair to her son unless she overcomes her prejudices: “Would I take my generalized anger against male privilege out on this little child who was dependent upon me for his survival, physical to be sure, but mental as well?” Nevertheless, Gordon remains torn between her principled animosity against “the male” and her maternal love: “We can’t afford wholesale male-bashing, nor can we afford to see the male as the permanently unreconstructable gender. Nor can we pretend that things are right as they are. . . . We must love them as they are, often without knowing what it is that’s made them that way.”13 Gordon still firmly believes that males need to be “reconstructed.” In saying “We can’t afford wholesale male-bashing,” she implies that a certain amount of bashing is proper.

  An unacknowledged animus against boys is loose in our society. The women who design events such as Son’s Day, who write antiharassment guides, who gather in workshops to determine how to change boys’ “gender schema” barely disguise their disapproval. Others, who bear no malice to boys, nevertheless do not credit them with sanity and health, for they regard the average boy as alienated, lonely, emotionally repressed, isolated, and prone to violence. These “save-the-male” critics start out by giving boys a failing grade. They join the girl partisans in calling for radical change in the way American males are socialized: only by raising boys to be more like girls can we help them become “real boys.”

  It is also unfortunate that so many popular writers and education reformers think ill of American boys. The worst-case sociopathic males—gang rapists, mass murderers—become instant metaphors for everyone’s sons. The vast numbers of decent and honorable young men, on the other hand, never inspire disquisitions on the inner nature of the boy next door. The false and corrosive doctrine that equates masculinity with violence has found its way into the mainstream.

  Now, it is the fashion to celebrate “The End of Men.” The male declinists like Slate’s Hanna Rosin and ABC legal analyst Dan Abrams seem to imagine a world of busy, consensus-building women, happily and competently interacting and managing the new economy.14 Rosin points to the explosion of jobs in the nurturing and communicating professions: boys are going to have to adapt to this new women-centered world, or perish. While it is true that family therapists, website designers, personal coaches, dance therapists, home health assistants, and executive producers are in high demand, it is not clear that this network of nurturers and communicators can be sustained without someone paying for it. Society still needs hard-driven innovators.

  Women are joining men as partners in running the world and even moving ahead of them in many fields, but they are not replacing them. After almost forty years of gender-neutral pronouns, men are still more likely than women to run for political office, start businesses, file for patents, tell jokes, write editorials, conduct orchestras, and blow things up. Males succeed and fail more spectacularly than females: More males are Nobel laureates and CEOs. But more are also in maximum-security prisons, and males commit most acts of wanton violence. But it usually takes other men to stop them. “Are Men Necessary?” asks New York Times writer Maureen Dowd. Yes, they are.

  Not because women lack the talent to do the things men do—women can be just as formidable and enterprising as men when they set their minds to it. But fewer women than men do set their minds to it. The sexes are equal, but they exercise their equality in different ways. There is a well-known complementarity between the two sexes. They need each other. They have even been known to love one another. How did we forget about these simple truths? And how have we allowed our society to become so badly rigged against boys?

  As part of our Great Relearning, we must again recognize and respect the reality that the sexes are different but equal. Each has its distinctive strengths and graces. We must put an end to all the crisis mongering that pathologizes children: we must be less credulous when sensationalistic experts talk of girls as drowning Ophelias or of boys as anxious, isolated Hamlets. Neither sex needs to be “revived” or “rescued”; neither needs to be “reinvented.” Instead of doing things that do not need doing and should not be done, we must dedicate ourselves to the hard tasks that are both necessary and possible: improving the moral climate in our schools and providing our children with first-rate schooling that equips them for the good life in the new century.

  We have created a lot of problems, both for ourselves and for our children. Now we must resolutely set about solving them. I am confident we can do that. American boys, whose very masculinity turns out to be politically incorrect, badly need our support. If you are an optimist, as I am, you believe that good sense and fair play will prevail. If you are a mother of sons, as I am, you know that one of the most agreeable facts of life is that boys will be boys.

  Acknowledgments

  I could not have written this book without the unstinting support of the American Enterprise Institute. AEI is the ideal scholarly environment where I was able to devote more than a year to this new version of The War Against Boys. I am especially grateful to the late Elizabeth Lurie. She believed in this book from its beginning in the late 1990s and was partly responsible for bringing me to AEI, where I wrote the first edition. She is dearly missed. I also want to thank Sue Koffel for her vital encouragement and support.

  I am heavily indebted to several research assistants and interns who have contributed so much to this project: Caroline Kitchens, Keriann Hopkins, Riva Litman, Emily Jashinsky, and Geneva Ruppert. Special thanks are also owed to two AEI colleagues and good friends who have been so generous with their time: Mark Perry and Karlyn Bowman.

  I owe a particular debt of gratitude to my editor at Simon & Schuster, Robert Bender, who encouraged me to write this second edition. Many thanks to Karyn Marcus, Jessica Chin, and Patricia Romanowski Bashe for shepherding this book through the production process.

  There is no adequate way to thank my husband, Fred Sommers. He is more interested in formal logic and metaphysics, but he patiently discussed every page with me. If he is tired of hearing about the plight of American boys, he never let on.

  My sons, David and Tamler, were at the forefront of my consciousness when I first wrote The War Against Boys. They have grown up to become wonderful men, but they were the paradigmatic boys whose cause this book defends. I dedicate it to them.

  PETER HOLDEN PHOTOGRAPHY © AEI

  CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, D.C. She has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Brandeis University and was formerly a professor of philosophy at Clark University. A frequent contributor to national newspapers, magazines, and websites, Sommers is the author or editor of several books, including Freedom Feminism, Who Stole Feminism?, and Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life. She is married with two sons and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

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  Notes

  Preface

  1. Success for Boys, “Outline,” Australian Government Department of Education, Employment, and Workplace Relations, www.deewr.gov.au/Schooling/BoysEducation/Pages/success_for_boys.aspx (accessed September 19, 2012).

  2. Boys’ Reading Commission, All Party Parliamentary Literacy Group Final Report, National Literacy Trust, July 2, 2012, www.literacytrust.org.uk/assets/0001/4056/Boys_Commission_Report.pdf (accessed September 19, 2012).

  3. Carolyn Abraham, “Failing Boys and the Power Keg of Sexual Politics,” Globe and Mail, October 15, 2010.

  1. Where the Boys Are

  1. Laura Zingmond, “H.S. 610 Aviation High School,” Insideschools.org, a Project of the Center for New York City Affairs, The New School, http://insideschools.org/index12.php?fs=1035 (accessed June 15, 2012). Statistic regarding college enrollment is dated January 2009. (The New York State average graduation rate is 72 percent.)

  2. New York City, Department of Education, Progress Overview, 2010–2011, http://schools.nyc.gov/OA/SchoolReports/2010-11/Progress_Report_Overview_2011_HS_Q610.pdf (accessed June 20, 2012).

  3. Aviation High website: www.aviationhs.net/site_res_view_template.aspx?id=a057d48e-a5d4-4049-86df-12ff765a9577 (accessed June 20, 2012).

  4. New York Department of Education website: http://schools.nyc.gov/SchoolPortals/24/Q610/AboutUs/Statistics/register.htm (accessed July 6, 2012).

  5. Marcia C. Greenberger, Leslie T. Annexstein, and Kathleen M. Keller to Chancellor Harold O. Levy, New York City Board of Education, August 16, 2001, in the possession of the author.

  6. Ibid.

  7. Betsy Gotbaum, Public Advocate for the City of New York, Blue School, Pink School: Gender Imbalance in New York City CTE High Schools, January 2008, p. 7.

  8. Whitehouse, Title IX at the White House, 1 hr., 1 min., 41 sec.; video recording. Uploaded June 26, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqLeg7eunsA (accessed July 26, 2011).

  9. Yupin Bae, Susan Choy, Claire Geddes, Jennifer Sable, and Thomas Snyder, Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women, NCES 2000-030 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 2000).

  10. Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993, HR 1793, 103rd Cong. Library of Congress THOMAS. Available at: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d103:H.R.1793: (accessed June 20, 2012).

  11. A Call to Action: Shortchanging Girls, Shortchanging America (Washington, DC: American Association of University Women, 1991), p. 4.

  12. US Department of Health and Human Services, “Secretary Shalala Unveils New Girl Power!–Girl Scouts Partnership,” news release, June 23, 1997. A Ford Foundation grant made it possible for How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report to be translated into French, Spanish, and Chinese and made available to UN conference delegates. According to PR Newswire (September 1, 1995), “Over a hundred AAUW members are meeting in Beijing and Hauirou at the UN Conference, [to] bring its concerns about access to education for women and girls to the table . . . How Schools Shortchange Girls, a groundbreaking report of gender bias in America’s schools, will be addressed during education reform discussion.” See also Anne Bryant, “Education for Girls Should Be Topic A in Beijing,” Houston Chronicle, August 30, 1995, p. 17.

  13. American Association of University Women, How Schools Shortchange Girls: The AAUW Report (Washington, DC: American Association of University Women, 1992).

  14. Here I am referring to the much-quoted study by David and Myra Sadker in which they claim to have found that boys in elementary and middle school called out answers eight times more often than girls. Allegedly, when boys called out, their teachers listened, but when girls called out they were instructed to raise their hands. However, David Sadker presented the finding in an unpublished paper at a symposium sponsored by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) and now it seems neither he nor AERA has a copy. He has also conceded that the eight-to-one ratio he announced might have been inaccurate. See: Amy Saltzman, “Schooled in Failure?,” U.S. News & World Report, November 7, 1994, p. 90. See also Judith Kleinfeld, “Student Performance: Males Versus Females,” National Affairs, Winter 1999, p. 14.

  15. Carol Gilligan, “Prologue,” in Making Connections: The Relational Worlds of Adolescent Girls at Emma Willard School, eds. Carol Gilligan, Nona Lyons, and Trudy Hanmer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 4.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Mary Pipher, Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls (New York: Penguin Group, 2005), p. 19.

  18. Bae, Choy, Geddes, Sable, and Snyder, Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women, p. 22.

  19. J. H. Pryor, S. Hurtado, L. DeAngelo, L. Palucki Blake, and S. Tran, The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010 (Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA, 2010), pp. 43, 67. Relevant data from aggregates of male and female responses to the question “What was your average grade in high school?,” in which a larger percentage of females than males received A’s and a larger percentage of males than females received C’s. The gap in percentage receiving A’s and percentage receiving C’s has remained constant since 1970. See also US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, High School Transcript Study (HSTS), 2000, 1998, 1994, 1990.

  20. Ibid. Relevant data from aggregates of male and female responses to the question “During your last year in high school, how much time did you spend during a typical week doing the following activities? Studying/homework,” pp. 56, 80.

  21. US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS:2002/2004), “First Follow-Up, 2004.”

  22. Pryor, Hurtado, DeAngelo, Palucki Blake, and Tran, The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010, pp. 58, 82.

  23. National Center for Education Statistics, The Nation’s Report Card: Arts 2008 Music & Visual Arts (Washington, DC: National Center for Education Statistics, 2009), executive summary, p. 2.

  24. For suspension rates in 2006, see US Department of Education, The Condition of Education 2009 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 2009), p. 206. For information on dropouts, see US Department of Education, The Condition of Education 2006 (Washington, DC: US Department of Education, 2006), p. 163. Boys are three times as likely as girls to be enrolled in special education programs and four times as likely as girls to be diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD). Males win the day when it comes to partying, watching video games, and drinking beer. Pryor, Hurtado, DeAngelo, Palucki Blake, and Tran, The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010.

  25. Lisa Wolf, “Boys’ Self-Esteem Problems,” Daily Beast, November 11, 2010, www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/11/11/boys-self-esteem-problems.html.

  26. College Board, 2010 College-Bound Seniors Total Group Profile Report, “Total Group Mean SAT Scores: College-Bound Seniors, 1972–2010,” 2010, http://professionals.collegeboard.com/profdownload/2010-total-group-profile-report-cbs.pdf (accessed July 11, 2012).

  27. College Board, College Bound Seniors: 1992 Profile of SAT and Achievement Test Takers (Princeton, NJ: Educational Testing Service, 1992), p. iv. See also Introduction to the 1998 College-Bound Seniors, a Profile of SAT Program Test Takers, www.collegeboard.org/sat/cbsenior/yr1998/nat/intrcb98; and Warren Willingham and Nancy Cole, Gender and Fair Assessment (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1997).

  28. The Condition of Education 1997, “Women in Mathematics and Science,” US Department of Education, p. 6, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs97/97982.pdf (accessed June 20, 2012).

  29. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), in a 2007 parent-reported survey of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder among children ages four to seventeen, boys were much more likely to have been diagnosed with AD/HD (13.2 percent of boys and 5.6 percent of girls). This means boys constitute 73 percent of AD/HD diagnoses. See Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Increasing Prevalence of Parent-R
eported Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Among Children—United States, 2003 and 2007,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 59, no. 44 (November 12, 2010), pp. 1439–1443.

  30. Christina Hoff Sommers, “The War Against Boys,” The Atlantic Monthly 285, no. 5 (May 2000), pp. 59–74; Peg Tyre, “The Trouble with Boys,” Newsweek (January 30, 2006). See also Marcia Vickers, “Why Can’t We Let Boys Be Boys?,” BusinessWeek, no. 3834 (May 26, 2003), p. 84. See also Richard Whitmire, “Boy Trouble,” The New Republic 234, no. 2 (January 23, 2006), p. 15. See also Brendan I. Koerner, “Where the Boys Aren’t,” U.S. News & World Report, 126, no. 5 (February 8, 1999), pp. 46–55. See also “The Gender Gap: Boys Lagging,” report by Leslie Stahl, 60 Minutes, CBS, February 11, 2009. See also “Author Richard Whitmire Examines the Gender Gap in Education,” ABC News, ABC, January 15, 2010. See also Richard Whitmire, Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That’s Leaving Them Behind (New York: American Management Association, 2010). See also Angela Phillips, The Trouble with Boys: A Wise and Sympathetic Guide to the Risky Business of Raising Sons (New York: Basic Books, 1994).

  31. See, for example, Duncan Chaplin and Daniel Klasik, Gender Gaps in College and High School Graduation by Race, Combining Public and Private Schools (Fayetteville: Education Working Paper Archive, Department of Education Reform, University of Arkansas, November 16, 2006). See also Arizona State University Center for Community Development and Civil Rights, Pathways to Prevention: The Latino Male Dropout Crisis (2007). See also Krista Kafer, Taking the Boy Crisis in Education Seriously: How School Choice Can Boost Achievement Among Boys and Girls (Washington, DC: Women for School Choice: A Project of the Independent Women’s Forum, April 2007).