Morgan Knull

     About a decade ago, Christina Hoff Sommers began doing a very unladylike thing. She had the temerity to track down the elusive sources of oft-cited statistics that purported to demonstrate that American women suffer pervasive discrimination and abuse at the hands of their fathers and husbands. As she later recalled in Who Stole Feminism? (1994), her research met with frustration in many cases, although it wasn’t her fault. Again and again, she exposed the controversial statistics as based on bogus studies or misinterpreted data. The sisterhood was not pleased with her efforts. But Sommers, a philosopher by training, was propelled into public life.

     The War Against Boys continues Sommers’ mission of debunking what she playfully terms the feminist establishment’s "Ms/information." Often lavishly subsidized by government grants, women’s advocacy groups disseminate "research" and statistics that make a mockery of the scientific method in the service of ideology.

     One illustrative case that Sommers cites involves the Women’s Educational Equity Act Publishing Center, a clearinghouse that distributes research to 200 educational conferences each year and that has received $75 million in federal funds since 1980. When Katherine Hanson, the Center’s director, triumphantly announced that her organization had received another government grant, she insisted that "every year nearly four million women are beaten to death" and that "the leading cause of injury among women is being beaten by a man at home."

     Sommers suspected that Hanson’s numbers might be flawed because only about one million women die each year in America from all causes combined. Even then, the leading causes of death are heart disease and cancer. In 1996, 3,631 women were murdered, a significant number but one nevertheless dwarfed by the number of women who committed suicide that year. In short, Hanson had nearly everything wrong. When Sommers interviewed her, she was unable to substantiate her claims, beyond making vague references to research.

     Hanson’s indifference to reality is not exceptional. Sommers describes how she and a friend attended a women’s conference that was rife with false statistics. When her companion pointed out factual errors in one presentation, the audience grew indignant. "This is not a discussion about statistics!" one woman shrieked. At other conferences, Sommers was asked to leave or had her presence in the audience announced over the public address system. But she did not return empty-handed.

     Feminist activists and government agencies are savvy marketers of their program. Sommers tells of attending workshops where elementary school teachers were instructed about "gender-neutralizing" co-ed classrooms. But what if parents object? The teachers were advised to respond to criticism by referencing the findings of unspecified "research," since the public usually is deferential to science. And those adults who persist in their skepticism about feminism should be smeared as resembling Holocaust deniers. This is how feminism responds to its critics.

     The War Against Boys’ second section offers a crash course on the social scientific method, in which Sommers assails "gender" researchers Carol Gilligan and William Pollack for ignoring. Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice launched a renaissance of "difference feminism," which acknowledges variation between the sexes. Gilligan, however, contends that such differences do not arise from the distinct biological and psychological endowments of boys and girls (a position that is known as "essentialism"). Instead, she maintains that children are "socially constructed" by environmental conditioning into false sexual identities and roles.

     Whatever their ideological appeal, Gilligan’s findings are not textbook examples of the scientific method at work. Twenty years later, Gilligan still refuses to release her In a Different Voice data sets to other researchers who wish to replicate her analysis, even though such data disclosure is common among scholars. Moreover, Sommers doubts that Gilligan sampled a sufficient number of children to permit generalized conclusions. At best, the research is anecdotal; at worst, Sommers cautions, it may be "reckless and removed from reality."

     None of these objections has tarnished Gilligan’s fame as an authority on children’s sexual identities. Like feminist psychiatrist William Pollack, whose unscientific study Real Boys climbed the bestseller lists after the Columbine High School shootings, Gilligan has responded to critics by claiming that conventional scientific and statistical standards should not apply to her work. After all, isn’t science biased against women? Doesn’t it serve the interests of the patriarchy? Sommers is trenchant in her rebuke of such irrationalism. It does not do to just explain away inconvenient scientific methods, she writes; the serious researcher is obligated to propose a superior research design to replace them. But Gilligan is a propagandist rather than a scholar.

     Surveying the trajectory of feminism in recent decades, Sommers notes that the initial alarmism about girls being academically disadvantaged has not withstood empirical challenge. Girls consistently outperform boys in reading scores, have greater artistic and musical ability, and take more Advanced Placement courses. While boys surpass their female classmates in other areas, they do not clearly dominate. But rather than conceding Sommers’ point—"there remains no reason to believe that girls or boys are in crisis"—activists and educators have responded by declaring that boys, too, are endangered. They have declared war on "masculine" virtues such as competition and daring by instituting anti-sexual harassment brainwashing and banning school playgrounds. Atlanta’s elementary schools even have abolished recess. The purpose of this sexual reeducation regimen is to compel boys to abandon their masculine identity in favor social passivity and sexual androgyny.

     The final and most significant part of The War Against Boys is devoted to urging that boys be appreciated for their own strengths rather than re-programmed to live in Hillary Clinton’s village. Sommers writes that "the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world," and should not be treated as a deviant pathology requiring treatment.

     Mediating between the stark "nature vs. nurture" dichotomy that seeks to explain the origins of sexual identity, Sommers recognizes that innate differences exist between boys and girls. This is increasingly demonstrated through research into fetal development and male-female differences in brain structure and process. "Boys will always be less interested than girls in dollhouses," she notes. "This does not mean that our sex rigidly determines our future." A minority of boys may prefer to play with dolls, but that fact cannot invalidate the natural predisposition most boys have toward playing competitive games.

     Sommers is careful not to endorse every natural impulse. She cites, for example, the higher rates of sexual promiscuity among teenage boys. "Given the biological changes boys are undergoing, their eagerness is natural and not unhealthy," Sommers writes. "On the other hand, society correctly demands that they suppress what is natural in favor of what is moral." It is the role of parents, particularly fathers, to teach their sons self-restraint and self-control.

     As a classical liberal, Sommers does not possess the modern liberal penchant for leveling. She argues that natural differences between men and women should be allowed to thrive within a framework of political and social equality.

     Central to Sommers’ philosophic position is a belief that freedom has an essential role in human relations. Such freedom operates on several levels. There is the social freedom that boys and girls should be given to develop identities consistent with their respective sex. But there is another kind of freedom, one which philosophers call agency, that allows individuals to transcend part of their natural endowment. That is what happens when teenagers choose chastity over sexual promiscuity; conversely, it occurs also when individuals rebel against traditional sexual roles that they find inhibiting. Sommers’ account of sexual identity thus encompasses both nature and agency.

     One of the ironies of contemporary life, Sommers remarks, is that a 30-year social experiment in Rousseauian liberation has paved the way for authoritarianism. "What happens when educators celebrate children’s creativity and innate goodness and abandon the ancestral responsibility to discipline, train, and civilize them?" she asks. Schools have become "value-free zones" filled with "incivility, profanity, and bullying." But that is not the fault of unruly boys. The answer to naughty kids is not drugging them with Ritalin or trying to reengineer their sexual identities—prescriptions that Sommers rightly terms "deeply authoritarian." Nor are metal detectors at every school entrance a solution.

     Instead, The War Against Boys calls on parents to cease "defecting from the crucial duties of moral education" by entrusting their children’s education to political activists and government bureaucrats. Education reform, including making single-sex classes more available in public schools, can be a first step. But to really return decency to schools and public life, adults must renounce the disastrous experiment of rampant individualism at the expense of community; a healthy society strives to balance the two principles. Ultimately, the relationship between an individual and his community can be mutually-enriching, as Sommers recognizes: "To educate, humanize, and civilize a boy is to allow him to make the most of himself."