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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 (Press the BACK button on your browser.) |
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VERBAL SICK Just a reminder of part of Hillary Clinton's speech to the First Ladies' Conference on Domestic Violence in San Salvador in 1998. "Women have always been the primary victims of war. Women lose their husbands, their fathers, their sons in combat. Women often have to flee from the only homes they have ever known. Women are often the refugees from conflict and sometimes, more frequently in today's warfare, victims. Women are often left with the responsibility, alone, of raising the children." I think that she forgot to mention the fact that their men had given up their limbs, their health and their lives to try to protect them. Either that, or her speech was designed to reveal how a nasty, ambitious, self-seeking, emotionally-retarded non-woman might think. "Women have always been the primary victims of war." !!! Goodness me. But that's feminists for you. Fatuous, Egotistical, Misanthropic, Immature, Narcissistic, Ignorant, Selfish, Thoughtless and Spiteful. END (Press the BACK button on your browser.) |
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Perpetrators of Child Abuse
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