The Male Eunuch. - Review - book review

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers (Simon &Schuster, 251 pp., $25)

A couple of kindergarten boys were recently suspended from school in New Jersey after being caught red-handed playing cops and robbers at recess. Finger-pointing, shouting "bang," running, playing dead-the incident involved the whole sorry litany of playground mock aggression. School officials were enforcing a Columbine- inspired "zero tolerance" policy against firearms at school, even the thumb-and-forefinger variety (where are the trigger locks?). But they were also acting on another trend afoot in American education: a disapproval of all the things boys do during recess. The Atlanta schools have eliminated recess altogether.

Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails have fallen on tough times. In fact, as Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrates in The War Against Boys, they have powerful enemies. The new book by the author of Who Stole Feminism? is a stinging indictment of an anti-male movement that has had a pervasive influence on the nation's schools and seeks, at bottom, nothing less than to eliminate the need for exasperated women ever again to shake their heads and mutter, "Boys will be boys." Sommers, an expert at debunking shoddy (and trendy) research, exposes the ballyhooed "crisis of young girls" as the creation of feminists armed with dubious studies and savvy PR skills.

Girls, the story goes, are supposedly ignored by teachers who call only on boys in the classroom and otherwise (vaguely) neglect and abuse them, catastrophically undermining their self- confidence. "Just as planes and ships disappear mysteriously into the Bermuda Triangle, so do the selves of girls go down in droves," Mary Pipher argued in her hit girl-crisis book Reviving Ophelia. "They crash and burn." Sommers catches Pipher in a typical bit of statistical dishonesty. Pipher cites the fact that suicide rates among children aged 10 to 14 rose 57 percent between 1979 and 1988 as evidence that "something dramatic is happening to adolescent girls." Actually, the suicide rate for boys had increased 71 percent, and for girls 27 percent; 61 girls killed themselves in 1988, 176 boys.

When it comes to girls in school, don't think of poor Ophelia, but the Reese Witherspoon character in the movie Election-together, smart, leaving the boys behind. Girls get better grades, do more homework, engage in more extracurricular activities, enroll in more advanced- placement classes (and fewer special-education classes), go to college in greater numbers, and so on. This doesn't mean that girls are academically superior to boys; just that the special needs of boys are being neglected. As competitiveness and individual initiative are discouraged, classroom discipline loosened, and outlets for natural rambunctiousness-e.g., recess-eliminated, school boys tend to tune out or turn on (to Ritalin).

Sommers traces the fundamental problem to the progressive, "child- centered" educational theories dominant in American schools. "Education and instruction should from the very first be passive, observant, protective, rather than prescribing, determining, interfering." Thus did Friedrich Froebel, the 19th-century inventor of kinder garten, sum up what would become the tenets of progressive education. But boys need their "prescribing" in big, strong doses. If they don't get it, they drift into their own little worlds of inattention and underachievement. Som mers points for evidence to Britain, which has addressed lagging boys by re- emphasizing teacher-led work, structured classrooms, frequent tests, and strict homework checks, sometimes in all-male classes led by male instructors. Early results suggest that in Britain, easily distracted Johnny now finds it easier to learn how to read.

If American boys are trailing girls, why all the focus on Ophelia? The career of superstar Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan is central to the answer. Famous as the first women's-studies professor at that institution, she is the chief phrenologist of academic feminism. In the past, she has rejected conventional standards of evidence as masculine tools-and ap parently meant it. Her best-selling 1982 book, In a Different Voice, argued that women have a moral psychology distinct from that of men. But other scholars haven't been able to confirm her findings and the three studies on which Gilligan supposedly based her work are suspiciously under wraps, unavailable for peer review. As Sommers writes, all of this has led to "serious complaints of a type that, in disciplines that respect scholarly standards, have been known to lead to censure-or worse."

Fortunately for Gilligan, her specialty isn't quantum mechanics, but "gender theory." In two books after Different Voice, Gilligan explored the way adolescent girls are traumatized by a "male-voiced" culture and quickly learn that "people . . . [do] not want to hear what girls know." So, according to Gilligan, preteen girls "know" things that they then "forget" in their teens as they are beaten down by the patriarchy. This provocative conclusion is based on small samples and extremely subjective interpretations. To simplify: Bitchy or politically liberal statements from girls are considered "knowing" by Gilligan, while anything polite or accepting of authority is taken as evidence of the dominant male culture at work.