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boys the weaker sex? Science says yes. But society is trying to
deal with male handicaps." With those words, U.S. News & World
Report opens this week's cover story on boys. The story is
a case study in the pseudo-science, media bias, and general silliness
that nowadays passes for knowledge about the differences between
the sexes.
The U.S. News cover story, written by Anna Mulrine, can't
quite decide whether boys and girls need to be raised androgynously
or educated separately. But in either case, as far as Mulrine is
concerned, masculinity itself is the problem. Little boys are stressed-out,
sensitive creatures whose problems originate in their failure to
vent their emotions like girls. On top of that, boy brains develop
slowly — so slowly that society ought to consider forcing boys
to enter school at a later age than girls, just to compensate for
their mental "handicap."
Mulrine's story is an uneasy blending of work by Carol Gilligan's
"boy crisis" crew and "the latest research" by scientists who claim
to know something about the relationship between the human brain
and the human mind. All of it--from the empirically thin and deeply
ideological work of the feminist psychologists, to the most speculative
claims of the brain researchers — is dubbed "science." And
nary a hint is given that the empirical work of the feminist researchers
quoted by Mulrine has been subject to withering criticism in the
course of a major public debate. In fact, it's impossible for the
reader to tell that many of the "experts" quoted by Mulrine are
part of an ongoing feminist campaign to create an androgynous society
— a world in which the differences between men and women are
a thing of the past.
Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan, the inspiring figure for many
of the researchers quoted by Mulrine, has long been known as the
founder of "difference feminism." In apparent opposition to those
feminists who deny all differences between the sexes, Gilligan argues
that women have fundamentally different moral and psychological
propensities than men. According to Gilligan, for example, Western
society elevates the male tendency to insist upon strict, rule-bound
"justice" over the female inclination to favor an "ethic of care"
and "relationship." Gilligan chastises Western culture for this
preference and claims to favor a stance in which the rule-bound
morality of men and the "relational" morality of women would be
equally valued.
Gilligan's brand of feminism has plenty of problems. Many of the
differences Gilligan focuses on are as much tensions within men
and women as they are differences between them. For example, there
has always been a deeply felt tension between justice and mercy
(i.e. "an ethic of care") in the West. And whereas Gilligan asks
that equal regard be given to the male and female perspectives,
she quite obviously tilts her comparisons to favor the "female"
point of view. But the most interesting development in Gilligan's
work has been its movement away from the celebration of male and
female differences and toward the notion that everything that distinguishes
men from women is a problem that needs solving.
Gilligan's "difference feminism," which at first drew howls of protest
from her more orthodox feminist sisters for supposedly ratifying
outdated "gender" stereotypes, now turns out to have been just a
more roundabout way of arguing for the elimination of the differences
between the sexes. The strategy is simple. Put your finger on
some key differences between boys and girls, then throw together
a quick and seemingly "empirical" study of these qualities. Make
sure the study appears to confirm that America's girls (or boys)
are in "crisis" — precisely because they have been acting like
girls (or boys) — and presto, you've created "scientific" backing
for the claim that only androgyny can save the nation.
The game was exposed only last year in The
War Against Boys, by the noted critic of feminism, Christina
Hoff Sommers. Sommers points out that virtually none of the studies
by Gilligan and her allies that claimed to establish the existence
of a "girl crisis" or a "boy crisis" were empirically sound. And
in response to Sommers's attack, Gilligan herself, along with her
allies, Harvard psychiatrist William Pollack, and the researchers
David and Myra Sadker, had trouble even producing their data, let
alone defending the validity of their research (Gilligan claimed
her data were confidential; the Sadker's said they had lost theirs;
Pollack's research was never published and failed to meet many of
the most basic requirements of scientific research).
Yet Sommers's widely discussed — and devastating — critique
of the underlying assumptions and empirical validity of work by
Gilligan and her allies receives not a single mention in Mulrine's
U.S. News cover story. Instead, William Pollack and David
Sadker are quoted as if they are serious "scientists," whose research
somehow proves that boys are "handicapped" just because they are
boys. To write a story about an alleged boy crisis that quotes
Pollack and Sadker as authorities, without so much as mentioning
the challenge raised against both researchers by Christina Hoff
Sommers, amounts to irresponsible reporting. But of course, this
is par for the course today (although there was a time when U.S.
News was a welcome exception to the rule of liberal bias in
the mainstream media). And of course Mulrine fails to mention that
the educational problems of boys cited throughout her story bear
out another of Sommers's central points — that the "girl crisis"
in education long touted by Gilligan and her allies is phony.
One of the sillier studies quoted in Mulrine's story supposedly
shows that boys may feel more stress than girls in emotional situations,
even though boys may appear less upset. What's the proof? It seems
that boys placed within earshot of a crying baby had higher increases
in heart rate and sweatier palms than girls, after which, unlike
the girls, the boys switched off the speaker broadcasting the baby's
crying. So the latest scientific breakthrough is the news that
crying babies irk boys more than they irk girls. No doubt the feminist
answer to this "crisis" is more dolls for boys.
The various boy-crisis studies cited by U.S. News miss the point.
Of course boys hide real and complex emotions beneath their veneer
of control. That's not a crisis; it's masculinity. Girls hide
ambition and rivalry beneath a veneer of caring. And why not?
Tension and division are built into human character. It's strictly
a question of how you'll be divided against yourself, not whether.
Men and women share much the same characterological "stuff," but
organize it differently. That gives life its spice — and not
incidentally, draws men and women together. As we used to be allowed
to say, men and women complement one another. Each releases, develops,
or contributes to the other qualities felt only as a kind of undertone
when a man or a woman is alone.
If there's a crisis out there, it's not a boy crisis or a girl crisis;
it's a family crisis. So why try to eliminate the most important
remaining factor that draws men and women together — the difference
between them? Yet Mulrine's wants us to raise boys and girls as
if they were interchangeable.
Or maybe not. Just when Mulrine seems to have heeded the call to
androgyny implicit in the Gilliganian line, she reveals a weakness
for the pronouncements of neurological researchers convinced that
boys' and girls' brains are hardwired for difference. That research,
in an apparent break from feminist schemes to socialize children
for androgyny, allegedly proves that boys and girls ought to be
educated separately.
Now separate classes for boys and girls may well be a good idea,
but not because of research that describes the emotional sections
of the brain as more "primitive" in men than in women. It's hard
to imagine something less "scientific" than the way in which utterly
speculative conclusions about the meaning of neurobiological research
on male and female brain differences are being peddled to parents
— in seminars on how to raise their sons — as if they
were established science.
Some conservatives might applaud the result — calls for separate
classes for boys and girls — as a way of countering the feminist
push for androgyny. But in the world of "boy crisis" educators,
the purpose of single-sex education is to reduce male-female difference
by turning girls into mathematicians and boys into expressive poets.
Conservatives enamored of pseudo-scientific theories spun from over-interpretations
of neurobiological research take note: Your taste for "science"
will quickly be turned against you.
Mulrine's cover story opens with the plight of Sandy Descourouez,
a mother whose girl is thriving but whose boys have been in a tail-spin
since Descourouez's nasty divorce. In this feminist morality tale,
the "happy" ending comes when Descourouez decides to treat her girl
and her boys as if there was no difference between them. Too bad.
The masculinity of those young men will be a "handicap" only so
long as it is neglected or denied. Those boys don't need androgyny.
They need a father.
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