Poor Boys
The war continues.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
July 24, 2001 8:40 a.m.

re 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.