Excerpt from The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Did anything of value come out of the manufactured crisis of diminished girls? There were some positive developments. Parents, teachers, and administrators now pay more attention to girls' deficits in math and science, and they offer more support for girls' participation in sports. But these benefits could and should have been achieved without promulgating the myth of the incredible shrinking girl or presenting boys as the unfairly favored sex.

A boy today, through no fault of his own, finds himself implicated in the social crime of "shortchanging" girls. Yet the allegedly silenced and neglected girl sitting next to him is likely to be a better student. She is not only more articulate, she is probably a more mature, engaged, and well-balanced human being. He may be uneasily 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 is uncomfortably aware that he is considered to be a member of the unfairly favored "dominant gender."

American schoolboys are lagging behind girls academically. The first step in helping them is to repudiate the partisanship that has distorted the issues surrounding sex differences in the schools. The next step is to make every effort to bring balance, fairness, and objective information into an urgently needed analysis of the nature and causes of those differences. But neither step can be taken while the divisive pro-girl campaign is allowed to go on unchecked and unchallenged.

The media and the education establishment can help by publicizing the studies by the U.S. Department of Education, MetLife, the Search Institute, and the Horatio Alger Association, as well as the academic research of Larry Hedges and Amy Nowell, Judith Kleinfeld, and Valerie Lee and her associates. All such studies expose the falsehoods disseminated by the girl partisans, and all show that the very term "shortchanged girls" is a travesty of the truth.

It is time the American public learned about the findings that supersede and contradict the accepted view that girls are academically weaker than boys. Because the British public is well informed about its boys, British schools have a significant head start in programs designed to lift boys out of the "disillusioned" category and to deal with their chronic underachievement. We have much to learn from their initiatives and even more from their healthy, commonsense approach to what they rightly see as a serious national emergency. For the time being, however, the academic problems of American boys are invisible.

What Next?

The gender theorists and activists who in the past had little to say about boys have recently begun to tell us that boys too need attention -- not because schools are neglecting their academic needs but because "under patriarchy," males are socialized to destructive masculine ideals. Gender experts at Harvard, Wellesley, and Tufts, and in the major women's organizations, believe that boys and men in our society will remain sexist (and potentially dangerous) unless socialized away from conventional maleness. It may be too late to change adult men: boys, on the other hand, are still salvageable -- provided one gets to them at an early age. Such thinking presents a challenge that many an egalitarian educator is eager to embrace. As one keynote speaker at a convention of gender-equity experts pointed out to her audience, "We have an incredible opportunity. Kids are so malleable."

The belief that boys are being wrongly "masculinized" is inspiring a movement to "construct boyhood" in ways that will render boys less competitive, more emotionally expressive, more nurturing -- more, in short, like girls. Gloria Steinem summarizes the views of many in the boys-should-be-changed camp when she says, "We need to raise boys like we raise girls."

This novel agenda is no utopian fantasy. Indeed, as I will show, the movement to overhaul boys is already well under way. And like many other well-intentioned but ill-conceived reforms, this one has enormous potential to make a lot of people -- in this case, millions of schoolboys -- very miserable indeed.

Copyright © 2000 by Christina Hoff Sommers