Christina Hoff Sommers may be a feminist, but she's also the mother of two sons. "It's a bad time to be a boy," she says. "More and more schoolboys inhabit a milieu of disapproval. All around them, boys find their sex regularly condemned, while girls receive official sympathy."
Sommers, a former philosophy professor who is now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., says "most parents haven't the slightest idea" of the hostility their male children encounter in classrooms dominated by female teachers who are as committed to combating sexism as they are to teaching the three Rs.
In her recently released book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, Sommers paints a shocking portrait of powerful feminist groups that, for more than a decade, have vigorously promulgated the myth that schools systematically shortchange girls.
In one instance, the American Association of University Women (AAUW) spent US$150,000 promoting a notoriously flawed US$100,000 study that claimed schools were poisoned against girls. The result, says Sommers, was a "spectacularly successful" media campaign that generated "more than 1,400 news reports and a flurry of TV discussions of the 'tragedy' that had struck the nation's girls."
In fact, data from numerous sources in several Western countries demonstrate unequivocally that the disadvantaged gender in our schools is male. Boys -- not girls -- now suffer from more learning disabilities and attain fewer post-secondary degrees. In the words of one educator quoted in the book, boys -- not girls -- "dominate the drop-out list, the suspension list, the failure list."
Contrary to the feminist fiction that schools lavish attention on male students while ignoring female ones, more boys than girls tell researchers that teachers are not interested in what they have to say. Seven out of 10 students of both genders also believe teachers prefer the company of girls.
Sommers argues convincingly that the myth of the disadvantaged girl continues to flourish nevertheless. "After so many years of hearing about the silenced, diminished girls, the suggestion that boys are not doing as well as girls is not taken seriously even by teachers who see it with their own eyes in their own classrooms," she writes.
She also makes it clear that there are serious consequences to such wrong-headedness. In 1996, for example, a program aimed at helping underprivileged black boys had its funding frozen and was ordered redesigned after being judged discriminatory to girls. Sommers quotes a capitulating Maryland school board official who says: "The point here is that we were shortchanging female students, and we're not going to do that any more."
That black males are, in the words of one expert, "at the bottom in every respect, in every academic indicator, every social development indicator" was considered less important by federal officials than a single parent's complaint that the program represented "blatant discrimination against girls." The fact that women now earn more than six of every 10 degrees awarded to American blacks and comprise 80% of the honour roll at historically black colleges was also apparently irrelevant.
Since the U.S. Department of Education still "disseminates more than 300 pamphlets, books, and working papers on gender equity" -- not one of which is "aimed at helping boys achieve parity with girls in the nation's schools," Sommers says it's almost certain boys will remain neglected.
As a result of her attempts to bring such issues to public attention, Sommers was compared to a Holocaust denier in an AAUW newsletter, and tossed out of a 1997 AAUW conference in which buttons reading "When We Shortchange Girls, We Shortchange America" were distributed.
Meanwhile, Carol Gilligan, a professor of gender studies at Harvard's Graduate School of Education (whom Sommers calls the "matron saint of the girl crisis"), remains adamant that female students and teachers are silenced by schools' "patriarchal structure." Other feminist educators persist in denouncing the "hidden curriculum of sexism" in schools while insisting on the importance of teaching "boys that male supremacy is unacceptable."
But the problem, says Sommers, is even worse than that an entire education system thinks the wrong gender needs special help. Those who continue to view males as unfairly privileged also implicitly see boys as violent and schools as institutions that churn out sexual harassers, rapists and wife-batterers. In the words of a 1998 National Organization for Women publication: "Our schools, in many respects, are training grounds for sexual harassment."
A climate in which such statements are casually asserted is one, says Sommers, that spawns government-funded booklets advocating exercises in which second- and third-graders declare: "I pledge to do my best to stop sexual harassment." It leads to cases in which three-year-olds in daycare are punished for hugging other children, in which nine-year-olds are handcuffed, fingerprinted and charged by police with sexual battery after bumping into fellow students in the school cafeteria, in which second- grade boys are prevented from passing out birthday party invitations, since inviting only boys is deemed by the principal to be sexist, and in which seven-year-olds are encouraged to identify gender stereotypes in Grimm fairy tales.
As one high school teacher observes, in such a climate, "Boys feel continually attacked for who they are. We have created a sense in school that masculinity is something bad. Boys feel blamed for history, and a school culture has grown up which is suspicious and frightened of boys."
The War Against Boys has received mixed reviews, even among those who might be expected to support its message. This is partly because Sommers, who correctly criticizes feminist-inspired attempts to persuade boys to behave more like girls (by banning competitive games and roughhousing on school playgrounds, for example), sees nothing wrong with restricting male behaviour along traditional gender lines. She fails to allow for the fact that not all boys thrive in what are seen as traditional male activities. Being ridiculed for reading rather than playing football surely also inflicts harm.
"In some segments of American society, boys still get a lot of grief if they stray from conventional masculinity," writes dissident feminist Cathy Young in her review of the book appearing in the online magazine Salon. Yet Sommers criticizes another writer who longs for a day in which young boys can "safely stay in the 'doll corner' as long as they wish, without being taunted."
Sommers' central thesis remains persuasive, however. Most boys, she says, "are not violent. Most are not unfeeling or anti-social. They are just boys -- and being a boy is not in itself a defect."
Britain is a decade ahead of North America in recognizing that boys are educationally disadvantaged -- and in establishing programs to address and overcome these difficulties. School officials on that side of the Atlantic have been creative in designing new curricula and courses that appeal both to boys' interests and competitive spirits. According to Sommers, early results are promising.
The irony inherent in the current state of affairs is that, while North American educational circles now view boys as potentially dangerous to girls and women, a society in which large numbers of poorly educated, unemployable young men are at loose ends is hardly a society in which violence can be expected to decrease.