Imagine being a male student of Jessie Klein, assistant professor of sociology and criminal justice at Adelphi University. Professor Klein has been immersed in the gender equity culture for two decades. Before going to Adelphi, she worked in the New York City Schools as a conflict resolution coordinator, social worker, teacher, and administrator. In her 2012 book, The Bully Society, she says, “Boys learn from an early age that they assert manhood not only by being popular with girls but also by wielding power over them—physically, emotionally, and sexually.”97 And she has a ready explanation for the school shootings:
The school shooters picked up guns to conform to the expected ethos dictating that boys dominate girls and take revenge against other boys who threatened their relationships with particular girls: their actions were incubated in a culture of violence that is largely accepted and allowed to fester every day. Transforming these hyper-masculine school cultures [is] essential to preventing . . . school shootings.98
Like Hanson, Klein has statistics to support her apocalyptic vision. She says, for example, that “in 1998, the FBI declared violent attacks by men to be the number one threat to the health of American women.”99 According to the Mayo Clinic, in reality the most serious threats are heart disease, cancer, stroke, chronic lower respiratory disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.100 Where did Professor Klein get her facts? Her source is an article in the American Jurist by a law professor from the University of Denver, Kyle Velte. But Velte gives no source. When my research assistant asked for the source, Velte explained that she no longer had it. There is no such FBI declaration. But what matters is that Professor Klein and Velte believe it and disseminate it. If you think that “violent attacks by men pose the number one health threat to women,” then it stands to reason that boys must be radically resocialized.
Klein also reports in her book, “Dating violence is another step on an escalating continuum of behaviors by which boys, schooled in traditional masculinity, demonstrate their power over girls.”101 But in the CDC’s 2009 study on youth risk behavior in grades 9–12, it found that 9 percent of girls and 10 percent of boys report being “hit, slapped, or physically hurt on purpose by a boyfriend or girlfriend.”102
How much does it matter that equity experts in the federal government, WEEA, AAUW, Ms., Wellesley Center, Adelphi University, and the University of Denver believe a lot of nonsense about male brutality and think of little boys as insipient batterers and worse? None of these things would matter much if the activists promoting these views did not play a major role in American education. Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 prohibits sex discrimination in any educational institution that receives public funds. The WEEA Center’s mission was to “provide financial assistance to enable educational agencies to meet the requirement of Title IX.”103 Eager to avoid charges of discrimination that trigger the punitive provisions of Title IX, many schools and school districts have “equity coordinators.” These experts were trained on materials that reflect the mind-set of Hanson.
The Fallout
The fear of ruinous lawsuits is forcing schools to treat normal boys as sexist culprits. The climate of anxiety helps explain why, in 2004, Stephen Fogelman from Branson, Missouri, was suspended for sexual harassment for kissing a classmate on the cheek. He was eight at the time. The stunned parents explained that the boy had no idea what sexual harassment was and did not know he was doing anything wrong.104
Stories about little boys running afoul of sexual harassment codes are everywhere. In January 2011, Levina Subrata was astonished to receive a note informing her that her son was being suspended from his school in a San Francisco suburb for having “committed or attempted to commit a sexual assault or sexual battery.” During a game of tag he allegedly touched another student on the groin. Her son was six years old at the time.105
In Gaston, North Carolina, a nine-year-old was suspended for remarking, to another student in a private conversation, that the teacher was “cute.” In this case, charges were dropped once the case gained publicity. The distraught mother was gratified by all the supportive attention. “This is something that everyone needed to see,” she told a local television station. “Just to see what’s happening within our school systems.”106
Sharon Lamb, a committed feminist and a professor of psychology, was shocked to hear that her ten-year-old son and his friend had been charged with sexual harassment. A girl had overheard them comment that her dangling belt looked like a penis. “It’s against the law,” the teacher informed the mother. This moved Lamb to ask, “If the message to boys is that their sex and sexuality is potentially harmful to girls, how will we ever raise them to be full partners in healthy relationships?”107
In early October 1998, Jerry, a seventeen-year-old at a progressive private school in Washington, DC, received the customary greeting card from the school director on his birthday. It was affectionately inscribed, “To Jerry—You are a wonderful person—a gift to all of us.” Two weeks later, this same director would expel Jerry when he was accused of harassing a classmate, and school officials would urgently advise his parents to “get him professional attention.”108
A female classmate accused Jerry of verbally harassing her. On one occasion, the girl claims, he said to her, “Why don’t you give so-and-so a blow job?” She also alleged that he licked his lips in a suggestive way. He denied these allegations. Finally (and this may have been the last straw), someone overheard him ask another boy on the bus, referring to the other boy’s girlfriend, “Did you get into her pants yet?”
When these allegations came to the attention of the school authorities, Jerry was ordered off school property. Following a hasty investigation, he was thrown out of the school. All of this transpired in little more than twenty-four hours. Jerry’s parents agree that he deserved some kind of reprimand or punishment. But expulsion?
Why did the school react with such a severe punishment? Schools rightly fear lawsuits, and many feel they can no longer afford to tolerate the usual antics of teenage boys. “He’s being punished for being an adolescent boy,” said Jerry’s mother. And she is right.
Pathological versus Healthy Masculinity
Sex differences in physical aggression are real.109 Cross-cultural studies confirm the obvious: boys are universally more combative. In a classic 1973 study of the research on male-female differences, Eleanor Maccoby and Carol Jacklin conclude that, compared to girls, boys engage in more mock fighting and more aggressive fantasies. They insult and hit one another and retaliate more quickly when attacked: “The sex difference [in aggression] is found as early as social play begins—at 2 or 21/2.”110 The equity specialists look at these insulting, hitting, chasing, competitive creatures and see proto-criminals. And that is where they go egregiously wrong.
There is an all-important difference between healthy and aberrational masculinity. Criminologists distinguish between “hypermasculinity” (or “protest masculinity”) and the normal masculinity of healthy young males. Hypermasculine young men do indeed express their maleness through antisocial behavior—mostly against other males, but also through violent aggression toward and exploitation of women. Healthy young men express their manhood in competitive endeavors that are often physical. As they mature, they take on responsibility, strive for excellence, and achieve and “win.” They assert their masculinity in ways that require physical and intellectual skills and self-discipline. In American society, the overwhelming majority of healthy, normal young men 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 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 boy is a proto-predator.
Of course, when boys are violent or otherwise antisocially injurious to oth
ers, they must be disciplined, both for their own betterment and for the sake of society. But most boys’ physicality and masculinity are not expressed in violent ways. A small percentage of boys are destined to become batterers and rapists: boys with severe conduct disorders are at high risk of becoming criminal predators. Such boys do need strong intervention, the earlier the better. But their numbers are small. There is no justification for a gender-bias industry that looks upon millions of normal male children as pathologically dangerous.
My message is not to “let boys be boys.” Boys should not be left to their boyishness but should rather be guided and civilized. It has been said that every year civilization is invaded by millions of tiny barbarians; they’re called children. All societies confront the problem of civilizing children—both boys and girls, but particularly boys. History teaches us that masculinity without morality is lethal. But masculinity constrained by morality is powerful and constructive, and a gift to women.
Boys need to be shown how to grow into respectful human beings. They must be shown, in ways that leave them in no doubt, that they cannot get away with bullying or harassing other students. Schools must enforce firm codes of discipline and clear, unequivocal rules against incivility and malicious behavior. Teachers and administrators have to establish school environments that do not tolerate egregious meanness, sexual or nonsexual.
These are demanding tasks, but they are not mysterious. We have a set of proven social practices for raising young men. The traditional approach is through character education: to develop a boy’s sense of honor and to help him become considerate, conscientious, and gentlemanly. This approach respects boys’ masculinity and does not require that they sit in sedate circles playing tug-of-peace or run around aimlessly playing tag where no one is ever out. And it does not include making seven-year-old boys feel ashamed for playing with toy soldiers. Boys do need discipline, but in today’s educational environment they also need protection—from self-esteem promoters, roughhouse prohibitionists, zero-tolerance enforcers, and gender equity activists who are at war with their very natures.
3
Guys and Dolls
In the summer of 1997, I took part in a television debate with feminist lawyer Gloria Allred. Allred was representing a fourteen-year-old girl who was suing the Boy Scouts of America for excluding girls. Girls fifteen and older can join the Explorer Scouts, which is coed, but Allred was outraged that girls younger than fifteen are not allowed in. She referred to same-sex scouting as a form of “gender apartheid.”1
I pointed out that younger boys and girls have markedly different preferences and behaviors, citing the following homespun example: Hasbro Toys, a major toy manufacturing company, tested a playhouse the company was considering marketing to both boys and girls. But it soon emerged that girls and boys did not interact with the structure in the same way. The girls dressed the dolls, kissed them, and played house. The boys catapulted the toy baby carriage from the roof. A Hasbro general manager came up with a novel explanation: “Boys and girls are different.”2
Allred flatly denied there were innate differences. She seemed shocked by the boys’ catapulting behavior. Apparently, she took it as a sign of a propensity for violence. She said, “If there are some boys who catapult baby carriages off the roofs of dollhouses, that is just an argument why we need to socialize boys at an earlier age, perhaps, to be playing with dollhouses.”
Allred has powerful allies. Resocializing boys to play more like girls has been a part of the gender equity agenda for several decades. Notably active on this front throughout the 1990s and early 2000s were the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, US Department of Education, and Harvard School of Education.
A Wellesley College Equity Seminar
In 1998, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women sponsored a daylong teacher-training seminar entitled Gender Equity for Girls and Boys: A Conference for K–12 Teachers and Administrators. It attracted two hundred teachers and administrators from the Northeast (teachers received state recertification credits for attending). One session, “Dolls, Gender and Make-Believe in the Early Childhood Classroom,” was concerned with sex stereotypes and how to defeat them. It was led by Dr. Nancy Marshall, a senior research scientist and associate director of the Wellesley Center, and two of her associates.
According to Marshall, a child’s sexual identity is learned by observing others. As she noted, “When babies are born they do not know about gender.” Since newborn babies know very little about anything, Marshall’s comment was puzzling. They don’t know their blood type either, after all, but they still have one. Marshall explained that gender, indeterminate at birth, is formed and fixed later by a process of socialization that guides the child in adopting a male or female identity. According to Marshall and her colleagues, a child learns what it means to be a boy or a girl between the ages of two and seven. In those early years the child develops a “gender schema”—a set of ideas about appropriate roles, attitudes, and preferences for males and females. The best prospects for influencing the child’s gender schema are in these early malleable years: these years are the opportunity zone.
Marshall and her associates presented a slide show, explaining, “A young mind is like Jell-O: you learn to fill it up with all the good stuff before it sets.” What counts as “good stuff” for the Wellesley pedagogues is making children as comfortable as possible participating in activities traditionally “associated with the other gender.” One favorite slide—to which they repeatedly referred—showed a preschool boy dressed up in high heels and a dress. “It’s perfectly natural for a little boy to try on a skirt,” they said.
The group leaders suggested that teachers “use water and bathing” to encourage boys to play with dolls. Acknowledging that preschoolers tend to prefer same-sex play, which reinforces “gender stereotypes,” they advised teachers in the audience to “force boy/girl mixed pairs.” In a follow-up discussion, one of the participating teachers boasted of her success in persuading her kindergarten-aged boys to dress up in skirts. Another proudly reported that she makes a point of informing boys that their action figures are really dolls.
At no time during this eight-hour conference did any of the two hundred participating teachers and administrators challenge the assumption that gender identity is a learned (“socially constructed”) characteristic. Nor did anyone mention the immense body of scientific literature from biologists and developmental psychologists showing that many male/female differences are natural, healthy, and, by implication, best left alone.3 On the contrary, everyone simply assumed that preschool children were malleable enough to adopt either gender identity to suit the ends of equity and social justice. The possibility that they were tampering with the children’s individuality or intruding on their privacy was never broached.
Early Interventions
Throughout the 1990s, equity activists in the Department of Education promoted a national effort to liberate children from the constraints of gender. The Women’s Educational Equity Act Resource Center (a national center for “gender-fair materials” maintained by the Department of Education) distributed pamphlets that confidently asserted the social origins of feminity and masculinity. Here, for example, is a passage from the center’s guide, entitled Gender Equity for Educators, Parents, and Community:
We know that biological, psychological, and intellectual differences between males and females are minimal during early childhood. Nevertheless, in our society we tend to socialize children in ways that serve to emphasize gender-based differences.4
In fact, we know no such thing. Play preferences of chimps, rhesus monkeys, and other primates parallel those of children.5 A special issue of Scientific American in the spring of 1999 reviewed the evidence that these play preferences are, in large part, hormonally driven. Doreen Kimura, a psychologist at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, wrote, “We know, for instance, from observations of both humans and nonhumans, that males are more aggressive than females, that
young males engage in more rough-and-tumble play, and that females are more nurturing. . . . How do these and other sex differences come about?”6 Kimura points to animal studies that show how hormonal manipulation can reverse sex-typed behavior. (When researchers exposed female rhesus monkeys to male hormones prenatally, these females later displayed malelike levels of rough-and-tumble play.) Similar results are found in human beings. Congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH) is a genetic defect that results when the female fetus is subjected to abnormally large quantities of male hormones—adrenal androgens. Girls with CAH consistently prefer trucks, cars, and construction sets over dolls and play tea sets. “It appears,” says Kimura, “that perhaps the most important factor in the differential of males and females . . . is the level of exposure to various sex hormones early in life.”7 These sorts of findings undermine the simplistic view that gender-specific play is primarily shaped by socialization.
The Department of Education equity educators promoted materials in the schools that ignored the scientific research. They assumed, along with Gloria Allred and the Wellesley Center experts, that typical male and female play preferences were the result of imposed cultural stereotypes. Creating Sex-Fair Family Day Care is a model curriculum guide for day-care teachers developed by the department’s Office of Educational Research and Improvement. It offers concrete suggestions on how to change children’s gender schemas.8
The central thesis of the guide is that the only way to win the battle over gender stereotypes is to stage interventions as early as possible, preferably in infancy. Masculine stereotypes receive the lion’s share of attention. Getting little boys to play with dolls is a principal goal. The 130-page guide includes ten photographs: two show a little boy with a baby girl doll; in one, he is feeding her, in the other, kissing her. The guide urges day-care teachers to reinforce the boys’ nurturing side: “It is important for boys and girls to learn nurturing and sensitivity, as well as general parenting skills. Have as many boy dolls as girl dolls (preferably anatomically correct). Boys and girls should be encouraged to play with them.”9
The War Against Boys Page 7
