The War Against Boys
The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men
By: Christina Hoff Sommers
[Fulfilled ‘A controversial book’ for Shelf Reflection’s 2023 Reading Challenge]
“What we share is a concern for all children, along with an awareness that boys appear to need special help right now. That is not backlash against female achievement; it is reality and common sense.”
This is no doubt a controversial book. We are in a culture promoting ‘girl power’ and ‘women empowerment’ and males are increasingly just associated with ‘toxic masculinity.’
The War Against Boys is a book written to expose the plight of our young boys. They are falling behind. In many ways, but in one surprising way— academics.
What’s worth noting is that this book was originally published in 2000 and then updated in 2012. As the year is currently 2023, I’m sure some of the statistics are outdated. Although I’d be curious to know in which direction. My guess is that considering the trend toward focusing on females has continued, it’s likely boys have fallen even more behind.
I am a mother of two girls and two boys. And I want them all to succeed in life and to be treated well. I want my girls to feel like their voice matters and that they can pursue any number of careers. I want them to feel equal in worth to boys. I want my boys to know that they still matter. That they are not what’s wrong with the world. That they are not destined to become violent discriminators. I want them to feel like their education matters too and that they do not need to be diminished in order to encourage the females in their lives.
It is a balance isn’t it?
What do they mean by ‘boys are falling behind?’
“studies by the DOE and the Higher Education Research Institute show that, far from being timorous and demoralized, girls outnumber boys in student government, honor societies, and school newspapers. They also receive better grades, do more homework, take more honors courses, read more books, eclipse males on tests of artistic and musical ability, and generally outshine boys on almost every measure of classroom success. At the same time, fewer girls are suspended from school, fewer are held back, and fewer drop out. In the technical language of education experts, girls are more academically ‘engaged.’”
Sommers, a former philosophy professor, discusses things like the wage gap, zero-tolerance policies, value-free education, socialization vs. biology, some lady named Carol Gilligan that apparently did a crap job of creating a legitimate study to prove her conclusions about girls being in despair and boys being violent,… among other evidence to show the ways that policies meant to help girls were potentially not necessary and further, were a hindrance to boys.
For some reason I thought this was going to be a faith-based book— probably because it was quoted in Alisa Childer’s book Live Your Truth (and Other Lies). But this was a secular book. The author dissects the issue from philosophical, social, psychological, and ethical perspectives.
I really liked this book because it put evidence and studies affirming the things I had already been noticing. I am pro-people. And it has made me uncomfortable with how much females are elevated at the expense and denigration of boys and men.
As she states in her book:
“The current plight of boys and young men is, in fact, a women’s issue. Those boys are our sons; they are the people with whom our daughters will build a future. If our boys are in trouble, so are we all.”
With all the things we hear and see about gender equality, this book was pretty enlightening to read and see how well girls are actually doing and how we need to stop ignoring the boys or stop only focusing on getting them to sit still, stop wrestling, and to play with more dolls.
I definitely think this book is worth everyone reading, if only to help us think critically about the ways studies are conducted and used to mislead the masses into potentially harmful policies.
The Gender Gap
It is touted in the media that the gap in education is based on race or class.
But in reality, the main gap in education is gender-based.
“the AAUW obscures the fact that the gender gap favors girls across all ethnic, racial, and social lines.”
People attempt to use the wage gap as evidence that boys are doing fine educationally. But further study (like Thomas Sowell’s book Discrimination and Disparities) reveals that there really isn’t a wage gap. When statistics include all the relevant variables and compare apples to apples, women often make more.
“The 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time. It does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked required per week.”
“When mainstream economists consider the wage gap, they find that pay disparities are almost entirely the result of women’s different life preferences— what men and women choose to study in school, where they work, and how they balance their home and career.”
“Today, women in the US earn 57% of bachelor’s degrees, 60% of master’s degrees, and 52% of PhDs.”
One interesting thing this book explains is that men are most found on the extremes:
“There are far more men than women at the extremes of success and failure. And failure is more common. There may be 480 male CEOs of Fortune 500 companies (20 women), 438 male members of Congress (101 women), and 126,515 full professors (45,571 women). But consider the other side… More than one million Americans are classified by the Department of Labor as ‘discouraged workers.’ These are workers who have stopped looking for jobs because they feel they have no prospects or lack the requisite skills and education. Nearly 60% are men. Consider also that more than 1.5 million men are in prison. For women the figure is 113,462.”
I’m curious to know what the current statistics for these figures would be.
Classroom Strategies
Classroom strategies have changed to become more geared toward girls.
“As our schools become more feelings entered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.”
I’m not sure how widespread these changes are— my daughter’s school in Iowa has not succumbed to these— but it is concerning. For example, many schools have eliminated tug-of-war and replaced it with tug-of-peace. They have outlawed the game of tag because it creates ‘victims’ and affects self-esteem. Dodgeball is being outlawed because it creates resentment. Recesses are going away. Anything that is a competition is adjusted so that no one’s feelings are hurt.
Activities in classrooms become feelings and imagination-oriented rather than physical. Imaginative play that has good guys and bad guys and superheros, etc is re-directed to something more ‘domesticated.’
“From the earliest age, boys show a distinct preference for active outdoor play, with a strong predilection for games with body contact, conflict, and clearly defined winners and losers. Girls, too, enjoy raucous outdoor play, but they engage in it less.”
Teachers and administration are blurring the lines between rough and tumble play and actual aggression. Boys are getting punished more for things that are not that serious. This was the zero-tolerance policy. It led to more suspensions which is a direct indicator of boys becoming disengaged in school and not going to higher education.
Also because behavior is often factored into grades by young ages and boys tend to ‘act out’ more than girls, their grades are affected adversely.
It’s quite eye-opening to consider the long-term effects of these classroom strategies in how boys relate to and perceive learning and school.
“In classrooms across the country little boys got the message that there was something wrong with them— something the teacher was trying to change. It is doubtful that these efforts at resocialization were ever successful. But they surely succeeded in making lots of little boys confused and unhappy.”
Socialization or Biology?
There are many voices saying that we have socialized gender differences between girls and boys and created these stereotypes of what they are interested in or enjoy playing with. But stereotypes typically come from a place of truth.
Virginia Valian, researcher of gender equity, says, “we don’t accept biology as destiny… We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate… I propose we adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences.”
But this is two very different things. We vaccinate and inoculate and medicate against harmful things that are in our body—disease— that shouldn’t be there.
“Being a typical little boy or girl is not a pathology in need of a cure.”
“Steven Pinker points to the absurdity of ascribing these universal differences to socialization: ‘It would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way.’”
I can speak from my own experience that girls and boys play differently. I had two girls first. So when the boys came, our house was already inundated with girl toys and dolls. My boys sometimes play with the dolls or the girls toys, but they more often than not play with the balls and the cars. Even if they push a stroller around it’s usually filled with cars or magnet tiles they’re constantly building with. We didn’t have to teach them that. They were naturally more drawn to those toys and interested in throwing and building and wrestling.
Carol Gilligan
There are two chapters dedicated to discussing Carol Gilligan’s studies and conclusions regarding boys and girls. I won’t go into all of it here but Sommers pokes a lot of holes in the methodology of Gilligan’s work and the fact that she did not release any information to be studied by others.
When a study that claims such ‘profound’ and ‘important’ things that affect half or more of the population, you’d think she would allow her methods to be studied in order to try to replicate them. She has kept records confidential.
Her work was apparently monumental in the movement towards shifting learning strategies to focus on girls and their self-esteem.
“Gilligan’s powerful myth of the incredible shrinking girl did more harm than good. It patronized girls, portraying them as victims of the culture. It diverted attention from the academic deficits of boys. It also gave urgency and credibility to a specious self-esteem movement that wasted everybody’s time.”
Value-Free Education and Morality
Another interesting classroom movement was the shift to “value-free” education.
“‘Values clarification’ was popular in the 1970s. Proponents of values clarification consider it inappropriate for a teacher to encourage students, however subtly or indirectly, to adopt the values of the teacher or the community. The cardinal sin is to impose values on the student.”
The school shouldn’t be teaching morals? Why would someone oppose that?
“Those who oppose directive moral education often call it a form of brainwashing or indoctrination. That is sheer confusion. To brainwash children undermines their autonomy and rational self-mastery, and diminishes their freedom. To educate them and to teach them to be competent, self-controlled, and morally responsible in their actions increases their freedom and deepens their humanity.”
Of course there are some areas of morality that people differ from— like when we start to talk about where morals come from and why we care about them and who decides what is right and wrong. But it also seems naive to think you can actually teach a classroom without instilling some version of morals, boundaries, or guidelines that dictate how people are treated in the classroom and beyond.
I like how the author states that: “Leaving children to discover their own values is a little like putting them in a chemistry lab full of volatile substances and saying, ‘Discover your own compounds, kids.’”
It is a service to children to develop ethics and morals in them from a young age. It helps them become autonomous adults functioning in the world.
Value-free education often becomes teaching kids to ‘question everything.’ But:
“Too often, we teach students to question principles before they understand them.”
Children benefit from having boundaries and learning principles. They do not benefit from a ‘free-for-all’ environment.
It was in this chapter on morality that Sommers talked about an organization called Positive Action that seemed to be doing good things in teaching kids to know, care about, and act upon morals.
“My message is not to ‘let boys be boys.’’ Boys should not be left to their boyishness but should rather be guided and civilized… History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and consecutive, and a gift to women.”
“Children need to be moral more than they need to be in touch with their feelings. They need to be well educated more than they need classroom self-esteem exercises and support groups. Nor are they improved by having their femininity or masculinity “reinvented.” Emotional fixes are not the answer. Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.”
Equal Opportunity or Equal Outcomes?
Another point of contention when thinking about ‘equality’ for boys and girls comes when we consider equal opportunity vs equal outcomes. Many female activists look at the outcomes, see disparity, and cry discrimination.
But equal outcomes is not a good measure of equal opportunity.
Title IX is a great example of this. In considering college athletics, it was looked at like this: if females make up 60% of the student body then they should make up 60% of the athletes at the school. But it doesn’t consider that 60% of females don’t want to participate in athletics. Generally speaking, females aren’t as interested in sports as males, especially at a collegiate level.
So in order to make the ‘outcome’ more equal, even though opportunity may be equal, colleges eliminate men’s sports teams so that the male athletes don’t far exceed the females in outcome. (This is why my husband did not have the opportunity to play on a tennis team in college— they didn’t have one.)
Why should the boys lose out on something important and beneficial to them just because females don’t care about it as much?
“‘Title IX does not require quotas,’ says the NCWGE. ‘It simply requires the schools allocate participation opportunities nondiscriminatorily.’ But over the years, this diffuse requirement has been interpreted by judges, Department of Education officials, college administrators, and women’s groups to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.”
This concept can be applied in many areas. Disparity does not equal discrimination. (This is, again, the basis of Thomas Sowell’s book.)
Inner Turmoil
A lot of the conclusions made by gender theorists is that girls and boys alike are both struggling with some sort of inner turmoil: girls because they are being oppressed by males in our socialization process and boys because they are being told to separate from their mothers and become men which causes them to become violent.
But, as Sommers provides evidence in this book— that is not actually the case. And the evidence supposedly accumulated to support that claim is inconclusive and poorly gathered.
“Before we call for radical changes in the way we rear our male children, we ought to ask the boy reformers to tell us why there are so many seemingly healthy boys who, despite having been “pushed from their mothers,” are nonviolent, morally responsible human beings. How do those who say boys are disturbed account for the fact that in any given year less than one half of 1 percent of males under eighteen are arrested for a violent crime?”
“To be sure, adolescence is a time of some ‘inner turmoil’— for boys and girls, in America and everywhere else, from time immemorial. But American children, boys as well as girls, are on the whole psychologically sound. They are not isolated, full of despair, or ‘hiding parts of themselves from the world’s gaze’— no more so, at least, than any other age group in the population.”
Other Countries
Sommers brings up Great Britain and Australia as being ahead of the US in identifying this plight of young boys and taking measures to help boys succeed academically. One way they do that is same-sex education classes— boys’ schools and girls’ schools.
I’m not sure how I feel about that solution. I can see how it would definitely help academics. I’m curious to know how certain social factors are affected by that scenario. And would the pros outweigh the cons? (She also describes in this book the success vocational schools have had in the US— that was intriguing information to me as well.)
Sommers rightly points out that the attitude of these countries about this problem is significantly different than the US.
“The mood in Great Britain and Australia is constructive and informed by good research and common sense. The mood in the United States is contentious, ideological, and cowed by gender politics.”
I hate that so many problems become politicized which in turn really just means we run circles around the problem and nothing helpful is ever done about it. Great Britain and Australia— can you send some of your common sense to the powers that be over here?!
“Americans seem all too ready to entertain almost any suggestion that a large group of outwardly normal people are suffering from some pathological affliction.”
That is a true statement too. As a whole, our country’s critical thinking skills have disappeared lately and everyone’s feelings are running the show.
And that means everyone loses.
“Most of all, we need a change of attitude. The women’s lobby, the Department of Education, the gender theorists in our schools of education, the ACLU, the authors of the Perkins Act Reauthorization, and the president of the United States are so carried away with girl power they have forgotten about our male children. They have distracted themselves and the nation from acknowledging a plain and simple fact: American boys across the ability spectrum and in all age groups have become second-class citizens in the nation’s schools.”
Recommendation
I’ve included a lot here— perhaps you’ve skipped over most of it. That’s okay. Especially if you plan to read the book for yourself.
I think ‘The War Against Boys’ is an important voice to have in the mix when we’re thinking about gender differences and how kids learn, play, and develop.
Gender differences is taboo right now, but all it takes is to have girls and boys of your own to see that gender difference is a very real and very natural thing. We would be naive to treat it as a disease we’ve created that needs to be cured.
I hope people read this book and recognize the things we need to pay attention to when it comes to our boys. And to see that boys’ success and future in the world is integral to girls’ success and future. There is no superior or inferior gender.
I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say this is a ‘war’ as the title suggests, but I definitely think boys are becoming more and more disadvantaged as activists continue to denigrate the male gender and slap unfair labels on them as a group and then punish them for it.
I would recommend everyone read this book— an oft-silenced perspective— and think about the ways we can encourage our boys to be engaged in school and learning and thus be better developed and prepared for adult life.
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