User:DanielTom/Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Hoff Sommers, PhD (born 1950) is a philosopher and author. Her works include: The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women, Vice and Virtue in Everyday Life, Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics, and One Nation Under Therapy : Why Self-Absorption Is Eroding Self-Reliance.

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• "[W]e are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world...
  That boys are in disrepute is not accidental. That did not happen all at once. For many years, women's groups have been complaining (we are good at thaty)that boys are benefiting from a school system that favors boys and is biased against girls...
  The research commonly cited to support the claims of male privilege and sinfulness is riddled with errors. Almost none of it has been published in professional peer-reviewed journals. Some of the data are mysteriously missing. Yet the false picture remains and is dutifully passed along in schools of education, in "gender-equity" workshops, and increasingly to children themselves."

• "Shaping the gender identities of schoolchildren is a heady enterprise. And it is inspired and informed by the ideas of gender experts in some of our great universities. Preeminent among these is Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. They see themselves as participating in a profound revolution that will change the way society constructs young males. Once boys are freed of oppressive gender roles, they foresee a change in boys' play preferences."

• "Gilligan and others at the Harvard Project see themselves as defining the principles of a needed revolution that will change the way young males are socially constructed. As Gilligan told The New York Times Magazine, "We might be close to a time similar to the Reformation where the fundamental structure of authority is about to change." Gilligan has nailed her preferred structure of authority to the door of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The stakes are high, she says. She is calling for a new and healing pedagogy to free boys from an errant masculinity that is endangering civilization: "After a century of unparalleled violence, at a time when violence has become appalling ... [w]e understand better the critical importance of emotional intimacy and vulnerability." Gilligan asks us to reflect on these vital questions: "What if the equation of civilization with patriarchy were broken? What if boys did not psychologically disconnect from women and dissociate themselves from vital parts of relationships?"
  But other questions could also be asked: What if Gilligan's theories about boys are a travesty of scientific objectivity? What if the programs and policies she and her colleagues recommend turn out to do more harm than good? And what, if anything, can be done to protect boys from the trusting educators who faithfully accept Gilligan's view that boys are too stereotypically male and need to have their "gender schemas" rearranged?"

• "This movement to change our children's concept of themselves is unacceptably invasive - indeed, it is deeply authoritarian."

• "Restoring fathers to the home is nowhere on Gilligan's list of priorities. Instead, Gilligan and her Harvard associates concentrate on changing things like boys' play preferences. In an interview for Education Week Gilligan talks of a moment when each little boy stands at a crossroad: "You see this picture of a little boy with a stuffed bunny in one hand and a Lego gun in the other. You could almost freeze-frame that moment in development." The interviewer reports Gilligan's comment on this crucial development period in boys' lives: "If becoming a boy means becoming tough, Gilligan says, then boys may feel at an early age that they have to hide the part of themselves that is more caring or stereotypically feminine.""

• "According to the New York Times, Gilligan's chair carries with it a half-million-dollar research endowment."

• "But before anyone enlists in Gilligan's project of getting boys in touch with their inner nurturer, he or she would do well to note that Gilligan's central thesis - that boys are being imprisoned by their conventional masculinity - is not a scientific hypothesis. It is an extravagant piece of speculative psychology that sometimes finds acceptance in schools of education but is not creditable in most professional departments of psychology.

• "Gilligan appears to be making the same mistake with boys that she made with girls. She observes a few children and interprets their problems as indicative of a deep and general malaise caused by the way our society imposes sex-role stereotypes on them. By adolescence, she concludes, the pressure to meet these stereotypes has impaired, distressed, and deformed both sexes. In fact, with the important exception of boys whose fathers are absent and who get their concept of maleness from peer groups, most boys are not violent. Most are not unfeeling or antisocial. They are just boys - and being a boy is not in itself a defect.
  Does Gilligan really understand boys? She finds boys lacking in empathy, but does she empathize with them? Is she free of the tiresome misandry that infects so many gender theorists who never stop blaming the "male culture" for all social and psychological ills? Nothing we have seen or heard offers the slightest reassurance that Gilligan and her colleagues are wise enough or objective enough to be trusted to lead the field in devising new ways of socializing boys.
  We have yet to see a single reasonable argument for radically reforming the identities of boys and girls. There is no reason to believe that such reform is achievable, but even if it were, the attempt to obtrude on boys and girls at this level of their natures is morally wrong. The new pedagogies designed to "educate boys more like girls" (in Gloria Steinem's phrase) are not harmless. Their approach to boys is unacceptably meddlesome, even subtly abusive.Gilligan's latest work on boys is even more reckless and removed from reality. The myth of the emotionally repressed boy has great destructive potential. If taken seriously, it could lead to even more distracting and insipid school programs designed to get boys in touch with their feelings. More ominously, it could lead to increasingly aggressive efforts to feminize boys - for their own sakes and the supposed good of society.
  In the mid-nineties, the new and equally corrosive fiction that boys as a group are disturbed was already accompanying the myth of shortchanged girls. How our culture binds boys in a "strait-jacket of masculinity" had suddenly became a fashionable topic. Prominent intellectuals, wielding great influence in education circles, gave respectability and power to the burgeoning save-the-males movement. There are now conferences, workshops and institutes dedicated to transforming boys. Carol Gilligan, professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes of the problem of "boys' masculinity ... in a patriarchal social order.""

• "The girl-crisis advocates have succeeded in projecting an image of males as predators and females as hapless victims. They have convinced school administrators, leaders of teachers' unions, and officials in the U.S. Department of Education to support them and fund them.
  It is precisely in drawing this conclusion that they go badly wrong, for they fail to distinguish between healthy and aberrant masculinity....Healthy young men express their manhood in competitive endeavors that are often physical. As they mature, they take on responsibility, strive for excellence, achieve and "win." They assert their masculinity in ways that require physical and intellectual skills and self-discipline. In American society, healthy, normal young men (which is to say, the overwhelming majority) don't batter, rape, or terrorize women; they respect them and treat them as friends.
  Unfortunately, many educators have become persuaded that there is truth in the relentlessly repeated proposition that masculinity per se is the cause of violence. Beginning with the factual premise that most violence is perpetrated by men, they move hastily (and fallaciously) to the proposition that maleness is the leading cause of violence. By this logic, every little boy is a potential harasser and batterer."

• "Too many of our schools are rife with incivility, profanity, and bullying; most of the hurtful behavior and intimidation is in fact nonsexual. And girls do their share of it. Almost any junior high school girl will tell you that girls can create as much misery as boys, especially among other girls.
  What we are facing in the schools transcends sex. But even when the misconduct is specifically sexual, it is not a manifestation of the sexist oppression of women. Hostile Hallways is the best-known study of harassment in grades eight through eleven. It was commissioned by the AAUW in 1993 and is a favorite of many harassment experts. But this survey revealed that girls do almost as much touching, grabbing and graffiti writing as boys. According to the study, "85 percent of girls and 76 percent of boys surveyed say they have experienced unwanted and unwelcome sexual behavior that interferes with their lives." Four scholars at the University of Michigan did a careful follow-up study of the AAUW data and concluded, "The majority of both genders (53%) described themselves as having been both victim and perpetrator of harassment - that is, most students had been harassed and had harassed others." And these researchers draw the right conclusion: "Our results led us to question the simple perpetrator-victim model." The simple male perpetrator/female victim model is, of course, the bread and butter of the gender-equity activists.
  The theory that sexual misconduct in our schools is part of a general endeavor by males to keep women socially subordinate is not far short of paranoid. Moreover, it conveniently ignores the fact that girls do almost as much harassing as boys. It assumes that boys have more power than girls in our schools. But boys are just as insecure as girls and just as vulnerable to humiliation and mistreatment. The root problem in our schools is poor discipline and too many children acting maliciously with impunity."

• "Recess - the one time during the school day when boys can legitimately engage in rowdy play - is now under siege and may soon be a thing of the past. In 1998, Atlanta eliminated recess in all its elementary schools. In Philadelphia, school officials have replaced traditional recess with "socialized recesses" in which the children are assigned structured activities and carefully monitored. "Recess," reported The New York Times, "has become so anachronistic in Atlanta that the Cleveland Avenue grammar school, a handsome brick building, was built two years ago without a playground." Dr. Benjamin Canada, the Atlanta school superintendent, acknowledges that many parents "still don't quite get it. They'll ask, 'So when are we getting a new playground?' and I'll say, 'There's not going to be a new playground.'"
  The move to eliminate recess has aroused little notice and even less opposition. It is surely not a deliberate effort to thwart the desires of schoolboys. Just the same, it betrays a shocking indifference to boys' natural proclivities, play preferences, and elemental needs. Girls benefit from recess - but boys absolutely need it. Ignoring differences between boys and girls can be just as damaging as asserting differences that do not exist. Boys, especially, are hit hard by any move to curtail or eliminate recess. Needless to say, school officials today would never act in a manner equally dismissive of girls' characteristic desires and needs, for they know they would immediately face a storm of justified protests from women advocates. Boys have no such protectors."

• "When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that the Virginia Military Institute was violating the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution by excluding women, it dealt an almost fatal blow to same-sex education for boys. In the majority opinion, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court retained full protection for any female-only programs that could be said to compensate for the disabilities women suffer: "Sex classifications may be used to compensate women 'for particular economic disabilities [they have] suffered,' to 'promote equal employment opportunity,' to advance the full development of the talent and capacities of our Nation's people. But such classifications may not be used, as they once were, to create or perpetuate the legal, social and economic inferiority of women."
  In light of this ruling, all-girls programs could still be seen as compensatory; all-boys programs, on the other hand, are regarded as discriminatory. The ruling puts a chill on all special initiatives for boys. However, while it discourages them, it does not strictly prohibit them. Programs that separate the sexes while offering each the same resources and opportunities remain permissible. At least, that is how the U.S. Office of Civil Rights seems to be interpreting the law. Programs in Maryland, Virginia, and California have so far survived legal challenges from the Office of Civil Rights because they cover both boys and girls and are voluntary. In practice, however, single-sex education is an allowable option for girls, but rarely for boys."