The Male Eunuch

From National Review, July 3, 2000 Issue
The Male Eunuch
Reviewing Christina Hoff Sommers's The War Against Boys.


By Richard Lowry, NR's editor

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers (Simon &Schuster, 251 pp.)

A couple of kindergarten boys were recently suspended from school in New Jersey after being caught red-handed playing cops and robbers at recess. Finger-pointing, shouting "bang," running, playing dead — the incident involved the whole sorry litany of playground mock aggression. School officials were enforcing a Columbine-inspired "zero tolerance" policy against firearms at school, even the thumb-and-forefinger variety (where are the trigger locks?). But they were also acting on another trend afoot in American education: a disapproval of all the things boys do during recess. The Atlanta schools have eliminated recess altogether.

Snips and snails and puppy dogs' tails have fallen on tough times. In fact, as Christina Hoff Sommers demonstrates in The War Against Boys, they have powerful enemies. The new book by the author of Who Stole Feminism? is a stinging indictment of an anti-male movement that has had a pervasive influence on the nation's schools and seeks, at bottom, nothing less than to eliminate the need for exasperated women ever again to shake their heads and mutter, "Boys will be boys." Sommers, an expert at debunking shoddy (and trendy) research, exposes the ballyhooed "crisis of young girls" as the creation of feminists armed with dubious studies and savvy PR skills.

As competitiveness and individual initiative are discouraged, classroom discipline loosened, and outlets for natural rambunctiousness — e.g., recess — eliminated, schoolboys tend to tune out or turn on (to Ritalin).

Or, Gloria Steinem puts it, "We need to raise boys like we raise girls." This gets to the heart of the matter. Critics often say feminists hate men. That's not quite it — they actually hate masculinity.

One Department of Education-funded consultant warns against Little League, "where parents and friends sit on the sidelines and encourage aggressive, violent behavior" (stealing bases, sliding home, etc.). The women at Ms. briefly suggested a boys' equivalent of Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which would have included a visit to abused women's shelters — just so the little guys would know what violent bastards men are. This is the subtext of — now effectively Supreme Court-mandated — sexual-harassment training in schools. So, boys are forbidden to engage in traditional boyish behaviors, and subjected to propaganda about the evils of men. If all this doesn't bleach the masculinity from them, well, that just shows — in the words of one influential feminist — the "need for [new] materials to defuse male resistance."

The War Against Boys bristles with examples of the kind that send parents fleeing from the public schools. Take Judy Logan, a middle-school teacher in San Francisco who is legendary among girl-partisans for her relentlessly feminizing pedagogy. Boys in her class are made to enjoy quilting, girls encouraged to vent their anger at men. In one project, Logan required each boy to give a presentation in the persona of an African-American woman. After one freckled-faced boy completed his rendition of Anita Hill, a delighted Logan exhorted the class, "Give her a hand, everyone!" The title of a chapter about Logan in an AAUW book: "Anita Hill Is a Boy: Tales from a Gender-Fair Classroom."

The fight against masculinity waged by foot soldiers like Judy Logan is not a bizarre sideshow to American culture. It is fundamental to the liberal project. The incorrigible maleness of men is a standing rebuke to the Rousseau-inspired notions of human moral plasticity that are central to liberalism. Sommers provides a charming, if slight, example: Her 14-year-old received a gooey, self-esteem essay exercise at school, asking whether he compared himself to others, whether he made such comparisons to make himself feel better, and whether such comparisons made him feel inferior. His answers, respectively: "Sometimes," "No, I do not," and "No." Academic feminists and their army of fellow-traveling psychologists and educational consultants must be scandalized by boys like this, who, despite everything, just refuse to play with dolls.

There is also an explicitly political element to the fight over boys. Tocqueville worried that the tender attentions of government would "soften" Americans and make them "timid." The modern welfare state has that tendency, but feminists are working toward the goal even more directly. It is no coincidence that behaviors frowned upon by liberals — owning guns, smoking, risk-taking generally — are predominantly male activities. Government fosters dependency, while feminist cultural warriors seek to rid the national character of precisely those traits that are naturally resistant to the nanny state: It's a pincer movement.

This is why Christina Hoff Sommers has written such an indispensable book, and why a goal for conservatives just as important as cutting taxes and limiting government should be keeping America safe for recess and Little League.

http://www.nationalreview.com/weekend/books/books-lowry061700.shtml