The War Against Boys

Christina Hoff Sommers | 1999/01/08

There is a surprising amount of hostility towards boys in this country. To put it bluntly: boys are politically incorrect. We may be the first society in history to turn against its male children.

I begin by describing a debate I had with celebrity lawyer, Gloria Allred, from California. Allred represented a fourteen-year-old girl who sued the Boy Scouts of America for excluding girls. She referred to same-sex scouting as a form of gender discrimination--she called it “gender apartheid.”

I defended the Boy Scouts. I told her that younger boys and girls have different preferences and behaviors, citing the following homespun example. Hasbro Toys, a major toy manufacturing company, tested a playhouse the company was considering marketing to both boys and girls. But it soon emerged that girls and boys did not interact with the structure in the same way. The girls dressed the dolls, kissed them, and played house. The boys catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof. A Hasbro general manager came up with an explanation: boys and girls are different.

Allred flatly denied there are any innate differences. She seemed shocked by the boys' behavior. Apparently, she took it as a sign of potential violence. She said, “If there are some boys who catapult baby carriages off the roofs of doll houses, that is just an argument why we need to socialize [to train] boys at an earlier age, perhaps, to be playing with dolls.”

Ms. Allred has powerful allies among educators. Gloria Steinem once said, “We need to raise boys more like we raise girls.” Many schools are now following her advice, not because they don't like boys--and not because they want to harm males--but because they sincerely believe that something is seriously wrong with young men in America. A growing number of experts now claim that, as a group, the nation's boys are disturbed, depressed, and not in touch with their feelings and are therefore prone to violence. According to these critics, their masculinity, their idea of what it is to be male, is making them miserable and dangerous. Two psychologists at Harvard University, Carol Gilligan and William Pollack, have declared a national boy crisis. At the same time, hard-line feminists are persuaded that unless we intervene to change boys at the earliest possible age, women and girls will continue to be “oppressed under patriarchy.” So there is a growing movement to save the males by making them less masculine.

Do American boys need to be saved? Do they need to be rescued from their masculinity? I do not think so. I do not agree that the nation's boys are in crisis. I see no evidence for it. Some boys, of course, are in serious trouble. So, too, are some girls. A small percentage of boys are antisocial and violent. But when looking at genuine social science research, you find that the vast majority of boys are mentally healthy. Being a boy is not a defect. It is not a disorder. It is not something you need to recover from.

The best way to explain the Save-the-Males movement is to describe some of the programs advocated by its founding members. Some of these descriptions may sound extreme. They are. But what worries me is that if no one stands up and protests, this thinking could easily become mainstream.

Take, for instance, the proposal by the Ms. Foundation for Women to create a national holiday for boys called "Sons Day." The Ms. Foundation, of course, created the school holiday for girls called Take Our Daughters to Work Day. But, to their consternation, many companies changed the day to Take Your Child to Work Day so as not to exclude boys. So the Ms. Foundation came up with the idea to design a separate holiday for boys called "Sons Day.” Sounds great, right? Wrong. Here are some ways Sons Day was to be celebrated:

“ Take your son for the day to an event that focuses on ending men's violence against women. Call 1-800 END ABUSE for more information.

“ Plan a game or sport in which the contest does not keep score or declare a winner.

“ Since Sons Day is on Sunday, get your son involved in preparing the family for the work and school week ahead by helping lay out clothes for siblings and making lunches.

And for boys not totally exhausted by all the fun and excitement of the day's activities, the Ms. planners had a suggestion for the evening: Take your son grocery shopping then help him plan and prepare the family's evening meal.

As the Ms. staff had planned it, Sons Day wouldn't even give boys a day off from school. One friend of mine called it "a holiday in hell for Junior." In the end, Sons Day was cancelled and the Ms. Foundation has gone back to the drawing board trying to come up with a new plan to protect Take Our Daughters to Work Day. Nevertheless, their attempt to initiate a boy's holiday tells us something about how these reformers see boys. Clearly they regard boys as undomesticated, too competitive, and in serious need of reeducation.

Another example of the Save-the-Males movement is a new antisexual harassment guide funded by the U.S. Department of Education and distributed by the National Education Association called "Quit it!" Written by several women's groups, “Quit it!” is directed at the supposedly sexually harassing behavior of small children, especially boys, in kindergarten through third grade.

In the preface the authors explain that boys need special training, not necessarily because they are "bad" but because "we must all do a better job of addressing the aggressive behavior of young boys." So "Quit it!" introduces teachers to activities designed to calm boys down and make them less volatile.

One such recommended activity is a new, nonviolent, nonthreatening version of the game of tag. Here is what the guide advises teachers to do (p. 86):

Before going outside to play, talk about how students feel when playing a game of tag. Do they like to be chased? Do they like to do the chasing? How does it feel to be tagged out? Get their ideas about other ways the game might be played.

After students share their fears and apprehensions about tag, the teacher is advised to announce that there is a new, nonthreatening version of the game called “Circle of Friends”--“where nobody is ever ‘out'.”

Perhaps some of the students experienced anger during playtime. The guide provides the teacher with the tools for organizing an in-class anger management workshop with the children. Reading it, you have to remind yourself that its suggestions are intended not for disturbed children but for normal five-to-seven-year-olds.

Here is how the Boston Globe describes one gender-fair school in Lexington, Massachusetts:

Four years after it created its gender equity committee, Fiske Elementary is rife with signs of raised gender awareness. A quilt of famous women, sewn by fifth-grade boys and girls, is displayed in the front hall. A wood sign on principal Joanne Benton's door declares this to be the “Princessipal's Office.” Benton proudly maintains that “we have no single-sex table in our lunch room, and at recess, boys and girls play kickball together.”

In more and more schools, boys are out of favor. Carol Kennedy, a longtime teacher and now principal of a school in Missouri, complacently told the Washington Post, ”We do take away a lot of the opportunity to do things boys like to do. That is get rowdy, jump around. We don't allow that.” Recess--the one time during the school day that boys can legitimately engage in rowdy play--is now under siege and may soon be a thing of the past.

In an extreme situation, about a month ago, four kindergarten boys in Sayreville, New Jersey, were suspended for three days for using their fingers as guns in a game of cops and robbers.

Why is all this happening now? Why would a leading women's group come up with a holiday for boys that involves calling 1-800 END ABUSE for suggested activities? Why is the Department of Education funding programs like “Quit it!” that treat young boys like fragile mental patients? As I said, there is deep concern that something is deeply wrong with boys. But what is it exactly? What is the problem with boys that justifies these extreme solutions?

In their defense, the Save-the-Males reformers point to the high level of violence in American society. Most of it is perpetrated by males and a lot of it is directed against women. The reformers say they are trying to attack the problem at its root, to reach boys at the earliest possible age and redirect them away from aggression and violence and toward nurture and compassion. And they come armed with some alarming statistics that makes their cause seem justified.

For example, Congress has created and the federal Department of Education supports an organization called the Womens Educational Equity Act Resource Center WEEA for short. On the WEEA website, a government supported website, mind you, there are some shocking statistics about male violence in American society. According to WEEA:

Violence is the leading cause of death for women.

And every year nearly 4 million women are beaten to death.

According to Katherine Hanson, the director of WEEA, these statistics are proof that males in our society are brought up to be aggressive, powerful, unemotional, and controlling. By her reckoning, the solutions proposed by programs like “Quit it!” and Sons Day to change the violent natures of boys make sense.

But there is just one problem. The statistics on this government-subsidized website are wildly false. They are, in fact, the most egregiously false statistics I think I have ever encountered.

Let's consider them in order of their shock value. First, the claim that 4 million American women are beaten to death each year by men.

Think about it. If the WEEA numbers are right, the United States is experiencing a level of carnage unparalleled in our century. Four million women beaten to death by men! Every year! That's 11,000 women a day!

In fact, the total number of annual female deaths in the entire country from all causes combined is approximately one million. Only a minuscule fraction of these deaths is caused by violence and an even tinier fraction is caused by battery. According to the FBI, the number of women who died from murder in 1996 was 3,631.

And the assertion that violence is the leading cause of death for women is equally false. For the record, the leading cause of death for women is heart disease, followed by cancer. But you wouldn't know it from visiting the WEEA website.

Ms. Hanson is deeply confused. There are women like her inside the Department of Education, in all the major women's advocacy groups, and at the Wellesley Center. Armed with egregiously false information--they believe passionately in the need to resocialize boys. She has suggested that one of the places to begin is Little League. Little League, says Hanson, “encourages aggressive, violent behavior.”

The movement to Save-the-Males is predicated on what can be called a “women are from Venus, men are from hell” philosophy. This is the philosophy behind attacks on Little League, and programs like “Quit it!” It informs the thought of the Princessipal in Lexington, Massachusetts, and administrators in New Jersey who suspended the kindergartners. It is the philosophy behind Sons Day.

It is absolutely true that males commit most of violent crime, at least 90 percent. But it is also true that the vast majority of males are not violent. In fact, according to the FBI, in any given year fewer than 1 percent of boys under eighteen are arrested for violent crimes.

It is not my position that boys need no improvement. All children need to be brought up with clear, distinct rules. But even more than little girls, little boys need structure and clear lines of authority. Boys who are ethically neglected have some very unpleasant ways of getting themselves noticed. It's not that girls are more moral than boys, they are not. Girls can be just as cruel and malicious as boys, if not more so. But crosscultural studies have confirmed the obvious: boys are more physically aggressive.

In a classic 1973 study of male-female differences, Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin conclude that, compared to girls, boys engage in more mock fighting and more aggressive fantasies. They insult and hit one another, and retaliate more quickly when attacked.

These sex differences are found in very young children, as soon as social play begins. A 1997 University of Vermont study compared parents' reports of children's behavior in twelve countries. Parents in the United States, Thailand, Greece, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Sweden reported that in every case, boys were more likely than girls to fight, swear, steal, throw tantrums, and threaten others.

Gloria Allred, Gloria Steinem, the authors of Sons Day, and many experts at Harvard and the Department of Education see these hitting, chasing, fighting, swearing, competitive creatures as future criminals. I just see boys.

I think it was the social theorist Hannah Arendt who said that every year civilization is invaded by millions of tiny barbarians--they're called children. Every society confronts the problem of civilizing its children, particularly its young males. History teaches that masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive; it also teaches that masculinity without morality is terribly destructive.

We have a set of proven social practices for raising young men. The traditional approach is through character education: to develop a young man's sense of honor and help him become a considerate, conscientious human being. In short, to turn him into a gentleman. This approach respects boys' masculine natures. It is time-tested and it works. Even today, despite several decades of moral confusion, most young men understand the term "gentleman" and approve of the ideals it connotes.

What the save-the-males reformers are proposing is quite different. They seek to civilize boys by rescuing them from their masculinity. "Raise boys more like we raise girls," is Gloria Steinem's advice. This approach is deeply disrespectful of boys.

I have been critical of some feminists in my talk today, but I'd like to end on an optimistic note. The subtitle of my book The War Against Boy's is "how misguided feminism is harming our young men." But there is a more generous and accepting kind of feminism that I strongly believe in--a feminism that asserts equality between men and women but also accepts their differences. A feminism that calls for fairness and understanding for both males and females.

Last year a book came out called Between Mothers and Sons. It is a collection of stories by feminist writers about what it is like to have a son. When I first saw it I thought it would be full of stories of mothers trying to save their sons from the violence and militaristic hegemony of the patriarchy. I expected to feel sorry for the boys. But the book surprised me. It turned out to be full of stories of women rediscovering the nature of boys, accepting it, and ultimately delighting in it.

Deborah Galyen, a short story writer and essayist, describes what happened when she sent her son Dylan to a Montessori preschool "run by a goddess-worshiping, multi-cultural women's collective on Cape Cod":

Something about it did not honor his boy soul. I think it was the absence of physical competition. Boys who clashed or tussled with each other were separated and counseled by the peacemakers. Sticks were confiscated and turned into tomato stakes in the school garden.

After agonizing over how she, a good feminist and a good pacifist, could be the mother of a stick-wielding, weapon-generating boy, Gaylen comes upon the answer. She writes:

A five-year-old boy, I learned from reading summaries of various neurological studies, is a beautiful, fierce, testosterone drenched, cerebrally asymmetrical humanoid carefully engineered to move objects through space, or, at the very least, to watch others do so.

Janet Burroway, a poet, novelist, and self-described pacifist-liberal, has a son Tim who grew up to become a career soldier. She is not sure how exactly he came to move in a direction opposite her own. She recalls his abiding fascination with plastic planes, toy soldiers, and military history, noting that "his direction was early set."

Tim takes her aback in many ways, but she is clearly proud of him. Throughout his childhood she was struck by his "chivalric character." "He would," she writes, "literally lay down his life for a cause or a friend. I am forced to be aware of my own contradictions in his presence: a feminist often charmed by his machismo."

Gaylen and Burroway discard some common anti-male prejudices when they discover that boys have their own distinctive graces and virtues. The love and respect they share with their sons leads them to overcome the fashionable resentments that many females harbor toward males. My suggestion is that, as a society, we follow the example of these feminist mothers and rediscover the goodness of boys. We need to stop treating the Dylans and Tims and Boy Scouts and Little Leaguers of the world as if they are afflicted with a disorder called boyness.

It is unfashionable to say so, but I will say it anyway: The energy, adventurousness, stoicism, and competitiveness of normal, decent males are responsible for much of what is right in the world. All ages have understood this. All healthy societies appreciate and prize their young men. Why, in this day and age, should we be turning against them?

If you are an optimist, as I am, you believe that good sense and fair play will prevail. If you are a mother of sons, as I am, you know that one of the more agreeable facts of life is that boys will be boys.

Related Subjects:

Feminism