Girl Power! and Other Idiocy
SOMMERS, CHRISTINA HOFF
Girl Power! and Other Federal Idiocy Government-sponsored propaganda for girls and boys. BY CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS George W. Bush's Department of Health and Human Services is planning to extend...
...But during the years when such findings were becoming better known, Donna Shalala was in charge at Health and Human Services, and underachieving, at-risk boys were not a priority...
...and under a new administration, CSAP is beginning to respond to criticism of its total neglect of half of American youths...
...Girl Power!, too, should be terminated, even though this will call down the wrath of feminists and a frenzy of lobbying from girl-partisans everywhere...
...program offered posters, postcards, bookmarks, book covers, stickers, water bottles, certificates, T-shirts, pins, and caps to "anyone who cares about girls"—"free of charge...
...Think again...
...Annual funding for all of CSAP approaches half a billion dollars...
...A Girl Power...
...Most girls do not normally think of boys as a hostile rival tribe with whom they are competing...
...Among its findings: "Females are more likely than males to come to school prepared to learn and to participate in school activities...
...Speaker's Guide," "For Adults who Care about Girls—A Resource Guide," "Girl Power...
...Sally Satel, a psychiatrist who combines policy research at the American Enterprise Institute with clinical work among substance abusers, expresses the dismay of some scientific observers when she says, "With so much of its money spent developing techniques to prevent drug use, one would think CSAP would place a strong emphasis on research design, data collection, and interpretation...
...Campaign Information Packet," "Girl Power...
...but this is the outlook Girl Power...
...According to Stanley Kurtz, who reviewed a tape and transcript for National Review Online, "Sommers was silenced the moment she began to raise questions about 'Girl Power!'—the female counterpart of the 'Boy Talk' drug prevention program that was the subject of the conference...
...According to Centers for Disease Control reports, in a typical year (1997), there were 4,483 suicides of people between the ages of 5 and 24...
...The princess rebels...
...They leave unmentioned the fact that boys actually kill themselves at five or six times the rate of girls...
...And if teachers are deferring to male leadership, the students themselves appear to be unaware of it...
...EDITOR'S NOTE: Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men, was stopped from completing her remarks at a government conference on drug-abuse prevention for boys, held in Baltimore on November 1. Partway through her talk, Sommers, an invited speaker, was cut off by the moderator, insulted by a fellow participant, and jeered by many in attendance...
...The numerous Girl Power...
...BY CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS George W. Bush's Department of Health and Human Services is planning to extend to boys a favorite initiative of the Clinton administration, a program sporting the perky name "Girl Power...
...The new program is based on the same questionable gender theory that inspired Girl Power...
...are still running the agency, and there are signs of a disaster in the making...
...The titles of the respective CSAP programs—"Boy Talk" and "Girl Power...
...campaign, with its anti-male subtext, its propensity to psychobabble, its spiteful "girl quotes," and its baseless belief that girls are being shortchanged and need to be empowered...
...It's perhaps not surprising that CSAP has become something of a joke among researchers seriously interested in the issue of drug abuse...
...self-esteem initiative belongs in a drug-use prevention research division is not explained...
...The HHS researchers and officials who developed Girl Power...
...Oddly enough, plans for "Boy Talk" are going forward despite the absence of any evidence that the six-year-old Girl Power...
...But Democrats tend to run for cover whenever the "female ways of knowing" crowd shows up...
...But then indifference to scientific soundness has been a hallmark of this enterprise from the beginning...
...brochures and booklets contain some innocuous messages, including health tips from which all children could benefit, boys no less than girls...
...in your Community," "Five Steps to Getting the Media to Cover Girl Power!," "Girl Power...
...Her father the king (a clueless, irascible, and benighted patriarch) punishes her by offering her hand in marriage to a "selfish and bad-tempered" prince...
...This is supposedly a bad thing...
...government-sponsored manuals, activity guides, diaries, T-shirts, coasters, and caps intended to rescue boys from their masculinity...
...Girls need to be encouraged to take power, as the Princess Petaluma did...
...But girls perform better in school than boys...
...Recent events make plain that the nation needs self-reliant, independent, stoical young men to protect us all...
...Of these, 701 were females, 3,782 males...
...Twelve-year-old Gabriela boasts, "I do things that boys are afraid to do...
...campaign has succeeded at its stated mission—discouraging substance abuse among girls by boosting their self-esteem and academic achievement...
...Keep it Going— Activity Guide for 12- to 14-year-old girls," and "Girl Power...
...just to swim in a freezing pool...
...If Boy Talk gets off the ground, we will soon see a spate of U.S...
...in 1996, 56 percent were women...
...and (2) of African Americans now in college, approximately 63 percent are female, 37 percent male...
...Someone somewhere in the Clinton administration must have been skeptical about the Girl Power...
...Most Girl Power...
...The goal is exemplary: to "help girls make the most of their lives...
...Operating outside the protocols of social science and blessed with political backers in high places—not just Secretary Shalala, but also first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton—Girl Power...
...Here is a partial list of the handsomely and expensively produced booklets, manuals, and guides that are sent on request to anyone who asks for them: "Welcome to Girl Power!," "Girl Power...
...boys need to learn to sit quietly and chat freely about their feelings...
...No one has shown that single-sex drug prevention programs are any more effective than gender-neutral programs...
...Girl Power!—as Thompson and Curie must appreciate, should they decide to grasp this nettle—is a potent symbol for its proponents...
...But pieties are no substitute for proof of effectiveness...
...inculcates...
...seems to have provided Shalala and like-minded "theorists" with a golden opportunity to redress the historic imbalance by launching a program free of what feminist epistemologists call "male ways of knowing"—ways of knowing consistent with the norms of logic, respect for facts, and rules of evidence...
...materials were developed in a little-known division of Health and Human Services called the Center for Substance Abuse Prevention (CSAP...
...Across the Country," "How to Access and Activate Girl Power...
...We asked Sommers to describe these two taxpayer-financed educational campaigns...
...Thus, "In 1970, 42 percent of all college undergraduates were women...
...Her archery skills are not merely equal to the knights'— they are far better...
...Curie, who was previously deputy secretary for mental health and substance abuse services in Pennsylvania, has a solid record of implementing effective and empirically tested programs...
...guides and activity books are actually achieved...
...activity guide" opens with a story about Princess Petaluma who "began to despise her Princesshood on her 11th birthday...
...In 1995, the Department of Education, for example, released "The Educational Progress of Women," a report comparing male and female achievement...
...booklets...
...Is it her fault that she had won the contest nine out of ten times...
...According to its website, CSAP "provides national leader-\ ship in the development of policies, ' programs, and services to prevent the onset of illegal drug use, to prevent underage alcohol and tobacco use, and to reduce the negative consequences of using substances...
...Thus, HHS "fact sheets" inform us that "teachers often defer to male leadership and social dominance" and that "girls (more so than boys) may develop low self-esteem . . . and perform less well in school...
...Its designers take a dim view of the ways masculinity and femininity are "constructed" in our society, and they seek to make boys and girls as much alike as possible...
...kept a discreet distance from the data reported by the Department of Education and the CDC...
...Rather, Shalala subscribed to the principle that girls are shortchanged victims in need of special attention...
...Meanwhile, what about the boys...
...expenditures for Girl Power!, while just a small part of that, are difficult to ascertain...
...Finally, six years after the inception of Girl Power...
...proliferated and by now is totally out of control...
...School Year Assignment Book...
...It remains to be seen whether Republicans have the steel to take on this embarrassing government propaganda and stand their ground...
...advocates should get a real kick out of two recent pieces of data (from Trends in Educational Equity, by the National Center for Educational Statistics, and The State of Blacks in America, by the National Urban League, respectively): (1) The writing scores of male eleventh graders are comparable to those of female eighth graders...
...It is always possible, of course, that HHS secretary Tommy Thompson will make it his business to restore elementary standards of common sense to his department...
...That augurs well for changes that are badly needed...
...Boys, according to materials compiled by Boy Talk planners, "are generally socialized to be self-reliant and independent, not to show emotion...
...One of the most disquieting findings was that "the gap in reading proficiency between males and females [favoring females] is roughly equivalent to about one and a half years of schooling...
...Readers are then invited to create their own "Girl-Powered ending" for the story...
...I get up at 6:30 a.m...
...She prefers hunting unicorns and entering archery contests with the knights to sewing and dancing...
...He has just appointed Charles Curie to direct the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, of which CSAP is a division...
...Otherwise their content is pure feminist propaganda...
...By the end of the Clinton presidency, the Girl Power...
...reflect this dubious philosophy...
...Another girl, Lily, says, "At dinner, I am the one who gets yelled at for interrupting, not my brothers...
...Girl quotes" expressing anger and resentment of males are featured in many Girl Power...
...Why the Girl Power...
...was launched in 1996, at a time when federal officials were deluged with statistics showing that an educational gender gap was indeed growing, and those on the wrong side of it were boys...
...I ride a horse everyday...
...How to Get It: Activity Guide for 9- to 11-year-old girls," "Girl Power...
...In a 1993 Department of Education study of several thousand tenth graders, 72 percent of girls but only 68 percent of boys "agreed" or "strongly agreed" with the statement "Teachers listen to what I have to say...
...These scholars, when asked, notoriously fail to produce the data that allegedly support their claim that girls are "shortchanged," "silenced" victims of gender bias in the schools and in society at large...
...I can be a better King than any son," she shouts at her father...
...At a press conference on women's health in 1993, Secretary Shalala remarked that "for too long, health research has been addressed from one point of view, the white male point of view...
...assignment book is full of "Fun Facts" for girls to enjoy...
...One Girl Power...
...A girl named Nina says, "We need to show those boys we are the BOMB...
...Gabriela adds, "I don't know who came up with the idea 'boys are better than girls' but I do know that we are all the same"—except she's just said she was braver...
...One may hope that Thompson and Curie will recognize the worthlessness of the Boy Talk project and eliminate it before it eats up any more money and confuses more boys...
...The moral is always the same: Traditional femininity is dreary and oppressive, and spirited, empowered girls should resist it...
...To shore up this notion, her department disseminated misleading or flat-out erroneous claims...
...But the same people who created Girl Power...
...Girls were more likely than boys to assume school leadership positions, to qualify for honors programs, and to enter college...
...If the fact that girls increasingly outnumber boys in college is "fun," Girl Power...
...Instead, they relied heavily on advocacy research of girl-partisan groups such as the American Association of University Women and on the "findings" of gender scholars like David Sad-ker of American University and Carol Gilligan, Harvard's first professor of gender studies...
...She demands a chance to prove it...
...Nor has CSAP ever seen the need to spend any part of its large budget on outcome studies to determine whether the benefits promised by Girl Power...
...HHS "fact sheets" and "talking points" similarly claim that "adolescent girls are twice as likely to attempt suicide than boys...
Vol. 7 • January 2002 • No. 17
