A War Against Boys?
Kimmel, Michael
DOUG ANGLIN isn't likely to flash across the radar screen at an Ivy League admissions office. A seventeenyear-old senior at Milton High School, a suburb outside Boston, Anglin has a...
...Why Now...
...Rescuing" boys actually translates into bashing feminism...
...Thus, their numbers tend to be few, and their mean test scores high...
...They "ruffle in a manly pose," as William Butler Yeats once put it, "for all their timid heart...
...This "reflects the puerile desire for human omnipotentiality in the form of genderless parenthood, a direct repudiation of fatherhood as a gendered social role for men...
...How utterly "selfish" of him...
...He changes diapers, gets up at 2:00 a.m...
...We're giving them the message, he says, that "boyhood is defective...
...You might even say that boys find their voices, but it is the inauthentic voice of bravado, posturing, foolish risk-taking, and gratuitous violence...
...He calls it "spanking responsibly," though I suspect school boards and child welfare agencies might have another term for it...
...His dire prediction is analogous to predicting forty years ago that, if the enrollment of black students at 01' Miss was one in 1964, and, say, two hundred in 1968 and one thousand in 1976, then "if present trends continue" there would be no white students on campus by 1982...
...Why would any selfrespecting boy want to attend one of America's increasingly feminized universities...
...Rambunctious boys were simply not tolerated...
...It's easy—if women do what they are bio6 8 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 logically programmed to do: stay home and raise boys (but not for too long) and constrain the natural predatory, aggressive, and lustful impulses of their men...
...But this is not the result of "reverse discrimination...
...As role models, fathers could provide a model of decisiveness, discipline, and emotional control—which would be useful for their naturally aggressive, testosterone-juiced sons at school...
...Boys tend to hate English and foreign IanDISSENT / Fall 2006 n 69 WAR AGAINST BOYS guages for the same reasons that girls love them...
...and treat them with respect...
...But he need not ever set foot in his child's room...
...Elementary schools are, we read, "anti-boy''—emphasizing reading and restricting the movements of young boys...
...The net effect of the No Child Left Behind Act has been zero-sum competition, as school districts scramble to stretch inadequate funding, leaving them little choice but to cut noncurricular programs so as to ensure that curricular mandates are followed...
...The problem of inadequate school funding lies not at feminists' door, but in the halls of Congress...
...Compare this to the comments of girls in the same study: I feel motivated to study English because .. . you have freedom in English—unlike subjects such as maths and science—and your view isn't necessarily wrong...
...Consider the parallel for girls...
...Doomsayers lament that women now outnumber men in the social and behavioral sciences by about three to one, and that they've invaded such traditionally male bastions as engineering (where they now make up 20 percent) and biology and business (virtually par...
...If there is a zero-sum game, it's not because of some putative feminization of the classroom...
...It is true that the rate of increase among girls is higher than the rate of increase among boys, but the numbers are increasing for both...
...Girls' mean test scores in English and foreign languages, for example, outpace those of boys...
...The current salvos concern boys...
...At the turn of the last century, cultural critics were concerned that the rise of white-collar businesses meant increasing indolence for men, whose sons were being feminized by mothers and female teachers...
...Peeking underneath the empirical facade helps explain much of the current lineup...
...This guy is a father simply because he has a Y chromosome...
...But simply shrugging our collective shoulders in resignation and saying "boys will be boys" sets the bar much too low...
...It's not real work...
...Only the most able and most secure girls take courses in those fields...
...The American university is now a "fluffy pink playpen of feminist studies and agitprop `herstory,' taught amid a green goo of eco-motherism . . . Such claims sound tinnily familiar...
...it is, rather, a political question of which "hardwiring" we choose to respect and which we choose to challenge...
...These three issues—declining numbers, declining achievement, and increasingly problematic behavior—form the empirical basis of the current debate...
...Perhaps the real "male bashers" are those who promise to rescue boys from the clutches of feminists...
...Boys can do better than that...
...He is a deeply involved parent...
...In English, they observe, there are no hard-and-fast rules, one expresses one's opinion about the topic and everyone's opinion is equally valued...
...Women left the home in search of work and fulfillment, abandoning their natural role of taming men and rearing children...
...But it's also deeply insulting to men, because it assumes that the nurturing of life itself cannot be our province...
...When Lionel Tiger argues that "the principal victims of moving toward a merit-based society have been male," one feels a certain resigned sadness...
...Too many boys remain in difficult math and science courses longer than they should...
...Girls are more likely to undervalue their abilities, especially in the more traditionally "masculine" educational arenas such as math and science...
...In 1960, 54 percent of WAR AGAINST BOYS boys and 38 percent of girls went directly to college...
...But these reforms new classroom arrangements, teacher training, increased attentiveness to individual learning styles—actually enable larger numbers of boys to get a better education...
...The beliefs, attitudes, and traits that form the foundation of gender identity and ideology are nowhere to be found—except as some mythic endocrine derivative...
...It's because there are no set rules for reading texts...
...At that same moment, Pollack notes, boys become more confident, even beyond their abilities...
...A parallel process is at work in the humanities and social sciences...
...He also suggests reviving corporal punishment, both at home and at school—but only when administered privately with cool indifference and never in the heat of adult anger...
...Gender stereotyping hurts both boys and girls...
...Fortunately," writes pro-fatherhood activist Steve Biddulph, "fathers are fighting their way back into family life...
...This disadvantages "rambunctious" boys, because many of these programs are after-school athletics, gym, and recess...
...Feminist women have been pleading with men to come home and share housework and child care—let alone to help raise their sons—for what, 150 years...
...In English you have to write down how you feel and that's what I don't like...
...Men naturally rebel against this...
...They can be men...
...to feed the baby, goes beyond "helping out" . . . to share equally in the work, joys, and responsibilities of domestic life...
...There is no doubt that boys are not faring well in school...
...they dropped out...
...Why don't the critics acknowledge these race and class differences...
...From the elementary level, they establish a philosophy that if you sit down, follow orders, and listen to what they say, you'll do well and get good grades," he told a journalist...
...speak their language...
...Feminism declares war against nature...
...Another boy noted: I find English hard...
...From elementary schools to high schools they have lower grades, lower class rank, and fewer honors than girls...
...But how do these same biologically driven, rambunctious boys magically grow up to be strong, silent, decisive, and controlled fathers...
...This antifeminist political argument is best, and most simply, made by Harvey Mansfield, author of the recent Manliness, in a November 3, 1997, op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal...
...Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous ills," writes David Popenoe...
...He has written widely about ideals of manhood and masculinity in American culture...
...Mortensen may be a competent higher education policy analyst but he's a lousy statistician...
...The boy crisis would be magically solved if fathers were not exiled from family life...
...The numerical imbalance turns out to be more a problem of race and class than gender...
...We men, they tell us, are savage, lustful, violent, sexually omnivorous, rapacious, predatory animals, who will rape, murder, pillage, and leave towels on the bathroom floor—unless women fulfill their biological duty and constrain us...
...66 n DISSENT / Fall 2006 Today, women teachers are once again to blame for boys' feminization...
...The spate of works about fatherhood that appeared several years ago is now being recycled in the debate about boys...
...It is what Cynthia Fuchs Epstein calls a "deceptive distinction"— a difference that appears to be about gender, but is actually about something else...
...Feminists, we read, have been so successful that the earlier "chilly classroom climate" has DISSENT / Fall 2006 • 6 5 WAR AGAINST BOYS now become overheated to the detriment of boys...
...The notion that men should be exempt from mundane housework and child care, which should be left to their wives, is deeply insulting to women...
...They are to teach the many ways a boy can be a man, use discipline to guide and build, and model manhood as emotionally attached...
...The traditional liberal arts curriculum, as it was before feminism, is seen as feminizing...
...Feminist-inspired programs have enabled a whole generation of girls to enter the sciences, medicine, law, and the professions...
...Boys' Lives and Fatherlessness However, those feminist women, many of whom are also involved mothers, are seen not as boys' natural allies in claiming a better education but as their enemies...
...By contrast, feminists believe that men are better than that, that boys can be raised to be competent and compassionate, ambitious and attentive, and that men are fully capable of love, care, and nurturance...
...Well, for one thing, it creates a false opposition between girls and boys, assuming that educational reforms undertaken to enable girls to perform better hinder boys' educational development...
...A seventeenyear-old senior at Milton High School, a suburb outside Boston, Anglin has a B-minus average and plays soccer and baseball...
...But he's done something that millions of other teenagers haven't: he's sued his school district for sex discrimination...
...Feminism taught us that...
...they even gave grades for "deportment...
...But what boys need turns out to be pretty much what girls need...
...It is never a biological question of whether we are "hardwired" for some behavior...
...And the imbalance is not uniform across class and race...
...Countless surveys suggest that young boys today subscribe to a traditional definition of masculinity, stressing the suppression of emotion, stoic resolve, aggression, power, success, and other stereotypic features...
...to imagine careers outside the home...
...David Blankenhorn's catalog of specious correlations, Fatherless America, that saw fathers' absence as the source of virtually every social problem in America, doesn't call for a new fatherhood, based on emotional receptivity and responsiveness, compassion and patience, care and nurture...
...Carol Gilligan's work on adolescent girls describes how these assertive, confident, and proud young girls "lose their voices" when they hit adolescence...
...Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families...
...Well, they're back...
...today the numbers are 64 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls...
...English isn't like maths where you have rules on how to do things and where there are right and wrong answers...
...asks George Gilder in National Review...
...MICHAEL KIMMEL is Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook...
...One expert, Tom Mortensen, warns that if current trends continue, "the graduation line in 2068 will be all females...
...Remember those World War II best sellers, like Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers, David Levy's Maternal Overprotection, and Edward Strecker's Their Mothers' Sons that laid men's problems at the foot of overdominant mothers, who drained their boys of ambition and hardy manliness and led them straight to the summit of Brokeback Mountain...
...By the time they get to college, they've been steeped in anti-male propaganda...
...it is because the boys bump up against the norms of masculinity...
...Among middle-class, white, high school graduates going to college this year, half are male and half are female...
...Aside from the obvious tautologies, what they advocate is exactly what feminists have been advocating for girls for some time...
...Males" are the topic, not "masculinity...
...It's Mom's...
...He may have a point: overworked teachers might well look more kindly on classroom docility and decorum...
...But its political origins are significantly older and ominously more familiar...
...Fathers, by virtue of being men, bring something irreplaceable to the family something "inherently masculine" notes Wade Horn, assistant secretary in the U.S...
...The father "protects his family, provides for its material needs, devotes himself to the education of his children, and represents his family's interests in the larger world"—all valuable behaviors, to be sure...
...WHAT'S WRONG with this picture...
...MIT is 62 percent male, 38 percent female...
...Gurian, for example, celebrates all masculine rites of passage, "like military boot camp, fraternity hazings, graduation day, and bar mitzvah" as "essential parts of every boy's life...
...If boys are doing worse, whose fault is it...
...To many of the current critics, it's women's fault, either as feminists, as mothers, or as both...
...Real work" involves a confrontation—not with feminist women, whose sensible educational reforms have opened countless doors to women while closing off none to men—but with an anachronistic definition of masculinity that stresses many of its vices (anti-intellectualism, entitlement, arrogance, and aggression) but few of its virtues...
...The debate about boys instantly morphs into a discussion of unwed mothers, single-parent families, babies having babies, and punitive and vindictive ex-wives (and their equally punitive and vindictive lawyers) who prevent men from being more present in their lives of their children...
...Boys regard English as a "feminine" subject...
...In a word, the boys themselves—or rather, what the boys feel, think, and believe— especially what they believe will make them men...
...Masculinity: The Missing Piece What, then, is missing from the debate about boys...
...This difference, and not some putative discrimination against boys, is the reason that girls' mean test scores in math and science are now, on average, approaching that of boys...
...By contrast, the smaller number of girls, whose abilities and self-esteem are sufficient to enable them to "trespass" into a male domain, skew female data upward...
...It's feminists who are really "pro-boy" and "pro-father"who want young boys and their fathers to expand the definition of masculinity and to become fully human...
...Now the problem with mothers is that they read The Feminine Mystique and ran out to pursue careers, which caused a mass exodus of fathers from the lives of their sons...
...In science and engineering, the gender imbalance still tilts decidedly toward men: Cal Tech is 65 percent male and 35 percent female...
...But in so doing, these same feminists have pathologized boyhood...
...He is a healer, a companion, a colleague...
...And when the First Lady offers a helping hand to boys, you know something political is in the works...
...It's the teacher's job to create a classroom environment that accommodates both male and female energy, not just mainly female energy," explains Gurian...
...The boy code teaches them that they are supposed to be in power, and so they begin to act as if they are...
...The answer can be a variety of things, you're never really wrong," observed one boy...
...Anglin's lawsuit, brought with the aid of his father, a Boston lawyer, claims that schools routinely discriminate against males...
...They "feminize" boys, forcing active, healthy, and naturally exuberant boys to conform to a regime of obedience, "pathologizing what is simply normal for boys," as one psychologist puts it...
...Women now constitute the majority of students on college campuses, having passed men in 1982, so that in eight years women will earn 58 percent of bachelor's degrees in U.S...
...College statistics are similar—if the boys get there at all...
...The work you do here is girls' work," one boy commented to a researcher...
...The antifeminist pundits have an unyielding view of men as irredeemably awful...
...Young males, says Charles Murray, are "essentially barbarians for whom marriage . . . is an indispensable civilizing force...
...There is no definite right or wrong answer, and you have the freedom to say what you feel is right without it being rejected as a wrong answer...
...given how clumsy and aggressive we are, it had better be done at a distance...
...Maybe they do...
...they pull the boys' mean scores down...
...But his proposed remedies—such as raising boys' grades retroactively—are laughable...
...The gender imbalance does not obtain at the nation's most elite colleges and universities, where percentages for men and women are, and have remained, similar...
...It is Horn who is promoting the backward idea that marriage-based programs will alleviate poverty when all available evidence suggests the opposite relationship, that alleviating poverty would actually lead to an increase in marriages...
...So fraternal lodges offered men a homo-social sanctuary, and dude ranches and sports provided a place where these sedentary men could experience what Theodore Roosevelt called the strenuous life...
...Feminist women not only promoted girls at the expense of boys, but they kicked dad out of the house and left boys wallowing in an anomic genderless soup...
...Presto: a debate about fatherhood and boyhood becomes a debate about feminism...
...This is further compounded by changes in the insurance industry, which often pressure therapists to put children on medication for ADHD rather than pay for expensive therapy...
...What he means is that the real father is neither nurturing nor expressive...
...It's not like maths and science where there is one set answer to everything...
...Fighting against whom exactly...
...Then, as now, the solutions were to find arenas in which boys could simply be boys, and where men could be men as well...
...But fatherlessness is not Dad's fault...
...Modern society was turning hardy, robust boys, as Boy Scouts' founder Ernest Thompson Seton put it, into "a lot of flat chested cigarette smokers with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality...
...His books include Manhood in America: A Cultural History (1996) and The Gendered Society (2003...
...This facile biologism leads the critics to propose some distasteful remedies to allow these testosterone-juiced boys to express themselves...
...Indeed, the point of such successful books as William Pollack's Real Boys and Thompson and Kindlon's Raising Cain is to expand the emotional and psychological repertoire of boys, enabling them to express a wider emotional and creative range...
...That "inherently masculine" influence is a triumph of form over content...
...In their best-selling Raising Cain, Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon describe boys' needs: to be loved, get sex, and not be hurt...
...They think only that people should be hired and promoted on merit, regardless of sex...
...The battle for boys is only the latest front...
...They're 50 percent more likely to repeat a grade in elementary school, one-third more likely to drop out of high school, and about six times more likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD...
...Harvard and Amherst enroll 56 percent men, Princeton and Chicago 54 percent men, Duke and Berkeley 52 percent, and Yale 51 percent...
...He expresses his emotions...
...He calls it "the boy code...
...Fears of i'momism"-that peculiar cultural malady that periodically rears its head—have returned...
...Discussions of boys' DISSENT / Fall 2006 n 67 WAR AGAINST BOYS problems almost invariably circle back to fathers or, rather the lack of them...
...Parents are counseled to allow boys their emotions...
...Boys lack adequate role models because their fathers are either at work all the time or are divorced with limited custody and visitation privileges...
...As Catharine Stimpson recently put it, "Real men don't speak French...
...Another problem is that the frequently cited numbers are misleading...
...None of the antifeminist pundits who seek to rescue boys from the emasculating clutches of feminism ever talks about what masculinity means to boys...
...FATHERS WOULD be present in their sons' lives (in this debate, fathers don't seem to have daughters)—if only women would let them...
...The cause of the boy crisis, we hear, is fatherlessness...
...Of the top colleges and universities in the nation, only Stanford sports a fifty-fifty gender balance...
...They operate from a facile, and inaccurate, essentialist dichotomy between males and females...
...How does a focus on the ideology of masculinity explain what is happening to boys in school...
...Boys, however, possessed of this false voice of bravado (and facing strong family pressure) are likely to overvalue their abilities, to remain in programs though they are less capable of succeeding...
...The "trouble with boys" has become a staple on talk-radio, the cover story in Newsweek, and the subject of dozens of columns in newspapers and magazines...
...Are males not also "hardwired" toward compassion, nurturing, and love...
...The protective element of manliness is endangered when women have equal access to jobs outside the home," he writes...
...It is not the school experience that "feminizes" boys, but rather the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed...
...It remains the case that far more working-class women—of all races—go to college than do working-class men...
...Boys could troop off with the Boy Scouts, designed as a fin-de-siecle "boys' liberation movement...
...Imagine that: it's feminists who actually believe in meritocracy...
...But only 37 percent of black college students and 45 percent of Hispanic students are male...
...Instead he rails against such a father in this sarcastic passage: He is nurturing...
...In adolescence, both boys and girls get their first real dose of gender inequality: girls suppress ambition, boys inflate it...
...Though the current boy advocates claim that schools used to be more "boy friendly" before all these "feminist" reforms, they obviously didn't go to school in those halcyon days, the 1950s, say, when the classroom was far more regimented, corporal punishment common, and teachers far more authoritarian...
...he is neither a partner nor a friend to his wife, and he sleeps through most of the young baby's infantile helplessness, oblivious to the needs of his wife and child...
...Michael Gurian argues in The Wonder of Boys, that, with testosterone surging through their little limbs, we demand that they sit still, raise their hands, and take naps...
...to continue their education...
...Part of this is a seemingly rational individual decision: a collegeeducated woman still earns about the same as a high-school educated man, $35,000 to $31,000...
...Women who do not consider themselves feminist often seem unaware of what they are doing to manliness when they work to support themselves...
...More people— that is, males and females—are going to college than ever before...
...Reading is lame, sitting down and looking at words is pathetic," commented one boy "Most guys who like English are faggots...
...accept a high level of activity...
...Schools are an "inhospitable" environment for boys, writes Christina Hoff Sommers, where their natural propensities for rough-and-tumble play, competition, aggression, and rambunctious violence are cast as social problems in the making...
...To many who now propose to "rescue" boys, such differences are incidental because, in their eyes, all boys are the same aggressive, competitive, rambunctious little devils...
...Pioneering research by Wayne Martino in Australia and Britain found that boys avoid English because of what it might say about their (inauthentic) masculine pose...
...70 n DISSENT / Fall 2006...
...Recent research on the gender gap in school achievement bears this out...
...And cutting "unnecessary" school counselors and other remedial programs also disadvantages boys, who compose the majority of children in behavioral and remedial educational programs...
...In leaving the home and going to work, women abandoned their naturally prescribed role of sexual constraint...
...And though it's tempting to parse the statements of a mediocre high school senior— what's so "natural" about rebelling against blindly following orders, a military tactician might ask—Anglin's apparent admissions angle is but the latest skirmish of a much bigger battle in the culture wars...
...colleges...
...When the self-appointed rescuers demand that we accept boys' "hardwiring," could they possibly have such a monochromatic and relentlessly negative view of male biology...
...By race, the disparities are more starkly drawn...
...Boys must be allowed to be boys—so that they grow up to be men...
...Men are WAR AGAINST BOYS fathers, but they are not required to do any real parenting...
...If not, would we allow males to be parents...
Vol. 53 • September 2006 • No. 4
