6/26/00 3:15 p.m.
Ignoring the Boys
Christina Hoff Sommers gets the Times treatment.

By Rich Lowry, NR Editor-------------------------------------richardlowry@hotmail.com

or the second time in recent weeks, the New York Times Book Review has run an utterly dismissive and unfair review of a conservative book on the gender wars. This time it's Christina Hoff Sommers who gets the Times treatment.

The Times gives her excellent The War Against Boys to Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, who is offended that Sommers would dare criticize his colleague Carol Gilligan (Gilligan wrote the other recent Times dis, a review of Stephanie Guttman's The Kinder, Gentler Military).

Coles doesn't have much space to expand his criticism beyond his apparently deep-felt conviction that no one should ever attack a Harvard liberal — because the Times paired Sommers's book with one by William Pollack (Pollack is a prominent proponent of the idea that American boys aren't emotional and weepy enough, whose work Sommers effectively rebuts in The War).

So, Coles only has about three long paragraphs for Sommers, but still manages to pack in plenty of idiocy. He complains that she takes issue with Pollack and Gilligan, when they "have spent years trying to learn how young men and women grow to adulthood in the United States." Well, so? The Chicago Cubs have spent about eight decades trying to win the World Series — it doesn't mean they are any good at it.

Then he defends Gilligan's "impressionistic" style by invoking Freud, who also had a loose and subjective style. About which two things should be said: 1) Freud was a genius and brilliant stylist whose work immediately entered the Western pantheon, while Gilligan is a dreary and predictable academic feminist; 2) if Freud had actually applied some hard research to his work, the world would have been spared some great foolishness (and pain — Freudians, for instance, used to blame "cold" mothers for their children's autism).

Coles flatly ignores the fact that the "crisis of girls" that Gilligan so impressionistically discovered is contradicted by almost every piece of evidence available. He grapples not at all with the array of facts Sommers musters in support of her thesis that boys are disadvantaged by American schools. He skates over her proposed remedies to the problem and the reasons she thinks they will work. In short, it's almost as if The War isn't really under review at all.

Which may have been what the Times — which had such a large role in pumping up Gilligan in the first place— would really have preferred. Coles scoffs at Sommers's argument that "uncritical" journalists refuse to acknowledge "dissenting voices" on questions of gender. Add Robert Coles to the list.