For more background on The War Against Boys, please see this.
Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers has been a guiding luminary in the quest to combat the excesses of the women's liberation movement for many years now. She is one of just a handful of scholarly researchers and authors - including Dr. Warren Farrell and Cathy Young - who have persistently and thoroughly exposed and debunked the politics of radical "gender feminism" for what is really is. In completing my own non-academic journalism fellowship on male-female relations (and its tragic condition today), I first met Dr. Sommers at least eight years ago at a D.C. conference, hosted by a well-known right-wing women's group. She and I subsequently chatted over the phone the following spring. But she was never quite available to have a full, on-the-record discussion. The thrust of my concern for Dr. Sommers, a resident scholar at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, was then and remains the same:
"You first published The War Against Boys in 2000. Following that was eight years of the Republican George W. Bush administration-led Department of Education. Laura Bush even said repeatedly that she wanted to help our nation's boys. In that time-span, the G.O.P. held Congress for six years. You now write that it's 'inconceivable that reports on the US boy gap would emanate from US Congress.' Why is it that one of radical feminism's central dogmas, which is that girls continue to suffer from massive disadvantage -- held dear as a cause by left-wingers -- is being sidestepped in such left-leaning countries as Canada, the U.K. and Australia? As you now point out, their governments have been intervening on behalf of males in schools for years. Why is it so different here in America, especially during and after lengthy conservative and Republican leadership, where the situation for boys is getting worse?"
Apparently, much didn't happen in the U.S. that should have, and Obama's and Biden's radical feminist sympathies have compounded the problems, thus calling for a second edition of this classic narrative. But with all their railing against excessive feminism among their most noted members, what have the G.O.P. right, including academic icons like Bill Bennett, ever done for boys? I can appreciate the change of the book's subtitle between editions, now omitting "misguided feminism." But I was hoping that this would allow for an elaboration of the way the modern right, and the G.O.P., is in some ways just as gynocentric as the left.
Surely, some who are right-of-center agree with much of modern feminism in general. But more of the political and cultural right seems to be based in misguided chivalry, which is equally paternalistically protective of females -- but in different ways. Just attend one of those conservative women's group conferences down in the D.C. area sometime to see what I mean. While emphasizing sex differences, as does Dr. Sommers, they'll lay bare their expectations of being wined and dined by male suitors, of women being able to "marry well," and then "stay home" as wives and mothers. As such, they'll rail that women being "driven to work outside the home" is more of a conspiracy by unmanly, non-committal sex-seeking men than any choice or cause carried out by women. This has been proven to be drivel many times over.
Of course, they'll give Dr. Sommers (and a few others like her) a time slot to give a breakdown of just how badly boys are treated in the American education system (including higher ed), the appeal being Dr. Sommers' arguments based on sex differences. But, as Dr. Sommers certainly makes clear by outlining the vast male underachievement in this new edition, the sorts of "manly, good providers" these ladies so desperately seek are going the way of tag games at recess. Of course, some of the pearl necklace G.O.P. ladies will give speeches reassuring themselves that most real men can still "make a decent living" without four-year degrees (at now-mostly liberal dominated campuses), or in some cases, without even two-year voc-tec programs past high school. If that's the case, a war against boys in formal classrooms, leading to their academic underachievement, wouldn't matter so much.
The War Against Boys (2013) shifts some of the focus off of organized, institutional feminism's warped, anti-male campaigns (that have received plenty of coverage) onto every day, local level, garden variety initiatives, including the scaling back of recess (for either more formal academic time or to curb aggressive behavior), zero-tolerance policies (to presumably curb at-school violence), and against single-sex schooling (that feminists once championed to improve girls' outcomes). Much of Sommers' original 1990s research illustrating boy-averse patterns remains in the new edition, and unfortunately remains relevant. The re-do of Chapter 1 is profound in itself: while the 90s figures pointed to several gaps, these latest figures depict more of a rift between the sexes. Test scores for boys are evermore lower than girls, on average, but now men's wages are falling off the cliff, with younger female workers in large metropolises out earning (after out learning) their peer males.
Many skilled, technically-based, decently-paid jobs are going unfilled today. The now-untrained, potential workers for many of them would otherwise be younger men. The economy and society simply cannot sustain this course. But Dr. Sommers describes some of this in the future-tense, as problems still yet to come IF we don't implement solutions. But it seems to many that they're already here. The White Knight-ism of some right-wingers sentimentally and indignantly declares that, no matter, what, "men and women aren't competitors," as though gender feminists comply with this view on some level. Women, these right wingers say, study humanities in college more often, while men are more likely to go to college and study the much higher-paid STEM fields, and they figure that this (along with eternal sex differences) is enough to combat any "imbalance." Otherwise, they would have lined up with Dr. Sommers ten years ago, and Congress would have acknowledged and explored this dreadful achievement gap between girls and boys.
I think it would be beneficial for Dr. Sommers to address the role of conservatives (or lack of), as the problems she keeps writing about remain partly due to them.
