War Against Boys
It is a bad time to be a boy in America. As the new millennium began, the defining event for American girls was the triumph of the U.S. women’s soccer team. For boys, the major event was the mass killing at Columbine High School. It would seem that boys in our society face great difficulties and risks as they grow up. Yet the best-known studies and the academic experts are telling us that it is girls who are suffering from a decline in self-esteem. The experts say that it is girls who need extra help with academics and elsewhere in a society that favors boys.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a Ph.D. in philosophy and a former professor of philosophy at Clark University, disagrees with the increasingly popular feminist views. Sommers believes that it is boys who are being shortchanged in a society that is rapidly becoming overrun with feminist views. There is no girl crisis, says Sommers. Girls are not being pushed aside, shortchanged, or repressed in American society argues Sommers. Girls are outperforming boys academically, and girls’ self-esteem is no different from boys’. Sommers believes that it is boys who are lagging far behind girls and Sommers attempts to prove this in her book: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men.
Sommers argues three main points in this book. First, boys encounter more difficulties growing up in America today and being successful in schools and colleges, than do girls. More boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs. Girls attempt
suicide more often than boys, but boys actually kill themselves more often. In a typical year (1997), there were 4,493 suicides of young people between the ages of five and twenty-four: 701 females, 3,792 males (Sommers 26). Research shows that boys, not girls, are on the weak side of an educational gender gap. Boys, on average, are a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing; they are less committed to school and less likely to go to college (Sommers 14). More boys than girls are suspended from school. More are held back and more drop out. Boys are three times as likely as girls to be enrolled in special education programs and four times as likely to be diagnosed with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)(Sommers 25). Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell, researchers at the University of Chicago, warned that the larger numbers of males who perform near the bottom of the distribution in reading comprehension and writing also have policy implications. It seems more likely that individual males with such poor literacy skills will have problems finding jobs in an increasingly information-driven economy (Sommers 34).
Second, boys are being confronted with challenges that arise from a society and educational system that are increasingly biased towards them. A boy today finds himself caught up in the social crime of shortchanging girls. Yet the supposedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be a better student. She is not only more expressive, she is probably a more mature, engaged, and well-balanced person. He may be uncomfortably aware that girls are more likely to go on to
college. He may believe that teachers prefer to be around girls and pay more attention to them. At the same time, he may also be aware that he is considered to be a member of the unfairly favored dominant gender(Sommers 43). More and more schoolboys inhabit an environment of disapproval. Often considered protosexists, potential harassers, and perpetuators of gender inequity, boys live under a blanket of criticism, in a permanent state of responsibility.
Third, this bias comes from the acceptance of certain major assumptions of feminism that have spread like wildfire through science, academia, the media, government, and more. The main promoters of a gender equal academic system have a lot of power in schools, but they are far too irresponsible with the truth, far too removed from the boundaries of common sense, and far too negative about boys to be properly playing any role in the education of children (Sommers 51). Feminists have been telling our culture for years that girls are falling behind in school, they’re being repressed in society, and losing out
