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29/8/00
Massachusetts Declares
'War' Against Boys
By Paul Moreno
Psychologists and professors from
Massachusetts are leading a "war against boys," says a philosopher
from Clark University, Worcester.
"Gender experts at Harvard,
Wellesley, and Tufts, and in the major women's organizations, believe that boys
and men in our society will remain sexist (and potentially dangerous) unless
socialized away from conventional maleness," says Prof. Christina Hoff-Sommers.
Prof. Hoff-Sommers, now with the American
Enterprise Institute, has received national acclaim from her new book, The War
Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.
She reveals that the federal government
is spending millions of dollars for "gender" research in
Massachusetts, and the experts are earning millions by recommending that boys
and men are pathological and need to be re-educated.
"The belief that boys are being
wrongly 'masculinized' is inspiring a movement to 'construct boyhood' in ways
that will render boys less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more
nurturing - more, in short, like girls," she says.
She says she is not warning about a
feminist fantasy, but a movement already well underway.
"Resocializing boys in the direction
of femininity is now high on the educational agenda of many educators, women's
institutes, and government officials. Notably active on this front of the
undeclared war against boys are the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the
Wellesley College Center for Research on Women, and the U.S. Department of
Education."
She says this is the latest development
in the feminist movement that has "liberated" women and girls from
traditional sex roles and now seeks to do the same for boys.
In her words, "This book tells the
story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of
healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and
forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring
of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the
world."
Boys Are "Shortchanged"
A milestone in this thinking originated
at the "Center for Research on Women" at Wellesley College in 1992. It
argued that schools discriminate against girls, ruin their self-esteem and stamp
them with a badge of inferiority that they wear for the rest of their lives.
It is now clear, says Hoff-Sommers, that the
report was a bogus pretext to subsidize and promote feminist propaganda, and
that the reality is that boys are the disadvantaged ones in our schools.
The 1992 report was prepared for the
American Association of University Women who labeled it "Shortchanging
Girls." It led to the 1994 "Gender Equity in Education Act,"
which allowed the federal government to spend billions of dollars to help
schools boost female achievement and to make teachers and students
"sensitive" to gender issues.
But the information is not true. Diane
Ravitch has said in the Wall Street Journal: "Girls get better grades than
boys; have higher scores in reading and writing; are more likely than boys to
take advanced placement examinations; and are likelier to go on to
college." Women earn more than half of college degrees, and the proportion
is rising.
The report from the Wellesley Center is
riddled with errors and much of its data is unavailable for review, says Hoff-Sommers.
Nevertheless, the media were completely uncritical of it, she reports, just as
they are with much feminist research. The New York Times did not provide a
critical analysis of the report until six years after it was issued. By then,
much damage had been done and millions of dollars had been spent following its
dubious assumptions.
What's more, when the Association of
University Women conducted a more scientifically reliable study in 1995, one
that did not find any significant "girl-shortchanging," not a single
newspaper reported it.
And the education gap is just the tip of
the iceberg of the boys' crisis. The Washington Post reports: "Boy babies
die in greater numbers in infancy and are more fragile as babies than girls.
Boys are far more likely than girls to be told they have learning disabilities,
to be sent to the principal's office, to be given medication for hyperactivity
or attention deficit disorder, to be suspended from high school, to commit
crimes, to be diagnosed as schizophrenic or autistic. In adolescence, they kill
themselves five times more often than girls do. In adulthood, they are being
incarcerated at ever-increasing rates, abandoning families, and becoming more
likely to be both the perpetrators and victims of violence."
Harvard Psychologist Feminizes Boys
Some experts quickly recognized and
responded to the opportunities in the "crisis" about boys, according
to Hoff-Sommers. Publishers paid a six-figure advance for a book by a
psychologist at Harvard Medical School which topped the New York Times
best-seller list for weeks after the Columbine High School shootings. The book
was by William Pollack, a psychologist at McLean Hospital, the teaching arm of
the Harvard Medical School, and is titled, Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the
Myths of Boyhood.
"[He] has no quarrel with all the
attention paid to girls over the past 20 years," says Hoff-Sommers. Pollack
believes that the AAUW "scare campaigns" are true. He writes that it
is true that schools "shortchange girls, fail in providing gender equity
and fairness, and actually hinder women's intellectual advancement in
society," and this has "largely been substantiated." He applauds
studies on the self-esteem "crisis" among girls.
But far from trying to restore
masculinity, Pollack's aim is to feminize boys - to rescue boys from their
"gender straightjacket" just as, he believes, women were rescued from
theirs.
For him and other experts, the chief
problem is that boys don't cry enough. "We bring boys up according to a
'code' that teaches them not to express vulnerable emotions, and shames them if
they do," he says. He complains that boys need to do a constant
"acting job," to "pretend to be confident when they feel afraid,
steady when they feel shaky, independent when they may feel desperate . . .
."
Other Local Experts
Other experts in the Commonwealth agree:
In their book, Raising Cain, Harvard Medical School professor Daniel Kindlon and
Cambridge psychologist Michael Thompson echo that we have "a culture that
suppresses their emotional life in service to rigid ideals of manhood." The
principal problem, they say, is that we expect boys not to cry, not to express
the full range of emotions that girls are permitted and encouraged to express.
Their goal is to destroy the code and
liberate boys. "It seems we're getting ready for a second gender
revolution," Pollack says hopefully, with boys ready to reject the
"boy code." Kindlon and Thompson counsel an end to the "miseducation
of boys."
These "gender experts" never
consider that these emotional traits are natural rather than cultural, that
controlling and suppressing emotion has always been part of being a man because
it is part of men's nature, says Hoff-Sommers. One person who does consider that
is Michael Gurian, author of The Wonder of Boys, who says, "Brain research
does not mean biology is destiny. It means biology is proclivity. . . . Part of
why boys (starting at about four or five) don't tend to cry as much as girls, or
men as much as women, is certainly that we have taught them not to. Much of that
teaching, however, has been a result of centuries of human understanding and
acceptance of the male brain."
But Pollack will not reconsider the
feminist rejection of biology-based gender roles for men and women or the idea
that women can "have it all." Pollack insists that men, too, can have
it all. Just as women have been told by feminists that they can have careers and
children without sacrificing either of them, Pollack says that "most
people's image of a healthy male is one who can succeed on the job, on the
athletic field, and in relationships, and change diapers."
The director of the Boys Project at Tufts
University, Barney Brawer, says that men should experiment with aspects of the
"culture of women." He told the Wellesley TAB, "If your son comes
to you and says that a friend is always hitting him, imagine how the
conversation might look between a mother and a daughter. How can you incorporate
some of that into your discussion?" Men should take part in traditionally
female activities with boys: Cook together, go grocery shopping, show boys that
men can do these things without compromising their masculinity." Women and
mothers should likewise act more like men and fathers.
Serious Doubts About 'Research'
Serious doubts have been raised about the
validity of the "research" on which these books are based, which seems
to confirm decades of suspicion about the psychological and educational
professions, Hoff-Sommers demonstrates.
She attempted to discover whether
Pollack's research had the endorsement of the prestigious Harvard Medical School
where Pollack works. Apart from his own vague interviews of 150 boys, there
did not seem to be any scientific basis for his study. The Harvard
authorities were reluctant to discuss the work, but allowed it to be publicized
in order to get media attention, Hoff-Sommers discovered. Pollack himself did
not return her calls.
Not only is his work anecdotal, it
takes the worst anecdotes and claims that they are typical of boys. The
psychopathic killers in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and at Columbine are taken as
merely extreme examples of common male traits. Hoff-Sommers notes that this sort
of stereotyping would never be permitted for any other group and it
"contributes to the national climate of prejudice against boys."
She confirmed what many critics of the
psychological profession have noted: Professional journals in psychology do not
police the "research" and therapists are not held to a high level of
scrutiny. Most therapists take outside criticism badly. Hoff-Sommers was
"politely asked to leave" a 1997 AAUW "leadership
conference." Her criticism of their methods was compared to "holocaust
revisionism."
One of the most important psychologists
to write on gender issues is Carol Gilligan of the Harvard Graduate School of
Education. Her 1982 book, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's
Development, sold over 600,000 copies and has been translated into nine
languages. Hoff-Sommers notes that Gilligan's work is based on virtually no
scientific evidence; Gilligan refuses to be judged by such
"patriarchal" standards. Her method is "voice-centered and
relational," based on open-ended interviews with no controls, which have
been unavailable for review.
The other "boys crisis"
researchers all hail Gilligan's work, and she was co-director of the Harvard
Project on Women's Psychology, Boys Development, and the Culture of Manhood.(Her
student and co-director, Barney Brawer, has moved it to Tufts and renamed it the
"Boys Project.") "Gilligan's latest work on boys," according
to Hoff-Sommers, "is even more reckless and removed from reality."
The education profession has also
contributed to the boys crisis. For years teachers have been trained in the
pedagogy of "progressive education," emphasizing cooperative learning,
group work, open classrooms and less testing. In fact, Hoff-Sommers points out,
what boys need most in the classroom is structure, discipline, teacher-led work,
and competition - everything that progressive education has rejected.
British educators have successfully
responded to the drop in male academic achievement by instituting such
traditional methods. But American experts prefer to "save" boys from
masculinity than to save them from academic mediocrity.
Victorian Straw Men
The gender experts claim to be at war
with "nineteenth century" stereotypes, but the real source of the
problems they analyze is the rejection of nineteenth century principles. Pollack
says that our problem is, "We want our boys to be sensitive New Age guys
and still be cool dudes." But these are not the only choices. Both, in
fact, are responses to twentieth century cultural breakdown. Another model that
he never considers is that of what used to be called a "gentleman." It
is the character that bourgeois society was supposed to produce, and it was the
kind of social type that the founders hoped the American regime would produce.
The type of character they meant to
produce was a familiar one: The Judeo-Christian, Anglo-American gentleman. There
are myriad descriptions of this type. Here is Cardinal Newman's: "It is
well to be a gentleman, it is well to have a cultivated intellect, a delicate
taste, a candid, equitable, dispassionate mind, a noble and courteous bearing in
the conduct of life." This is neither "sensitive New Ager" nor
"cool dude." Or consider this code of gentleman's conduct from VMI in
its all-male days: "A gentleman does not lose his temper; nor exhibit
anger, fear, hate, embarrassment, ardor or hilarity in public." Above all,
gentlemen controlled themselves. They were not expressive and emotionally
self-indulgent.
Feminists and liberals have denigrated
these masculine virtues as destructive and tried to inculcate in boys the
feminine virtues of care and nurture. But, Hoff-Sommers says, "The
so-called manly virtues of duty, honor, and self-sacrifice are caring
virtues."
Hoff-Sommers says that our society needs
more to be rescued from its narcissism than it needs to rescue boys from
reticence and repression. Our gender experts ought to consider that "male
stoicism and reserve may well be traits to be encouraged, not vices or
psychological weaknesses to overcome."
All of the world's religions and great
civilizations have considered self-control a virtue, she notes. "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."
Click here
for a 30-minute read of detailed coverage of the lies, deceits and distortions of
feminists who will clearly do anything, no matter how dishonest, to debase and
humiliate the male gender when it comes to their education.
END
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