The War Against Boys

by Christina Hoff Sommers

  On several of the tests he and his group administered, most of the 150 boys showed themselves to be healthy and well-adjusted. A self-esteem test found them confident. The Beck Depression Inventory, a widely used psychological assessment tool, uncovered “little or no clinical depression.”8 In private interviews, the boys said they were close to their families and enjoyed strong friendships with both males and females. Something called the King & King’s Sex-Role Egalitarianism Scale found the vast majority of them agreeing that “there should be equal pay for equal work,” “men should share in the housework,” and “men should express their feelings.”9

  Pollack, however, repeatedly warns readers not to be fooled by such seemingly encouraging results. By interviewing boys and giving them tests that measure “unconscious attitudes,” he claims to have found a truer picture, one of forlorn, alienated, and unconfident boys: “The results of this study of ‘normal’ everyday boys were deeply disturbing. They showed that while boys on the surface pretend to be doing ‘fine,’ beneath the outward bravado—what I have called the ‘mask of masculinity’—many of our sons are in crisis.”10

  In one probe of the boys’“deeper unconscious processes,” Pollack used a “modified” Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). In TAT tests, subjects are shown ambiguous pictures of people and scenes and asked to describe them; it is assumed that subjects will project their own hopes and fears into the pictures. Pollack and his colleagues presented the boys with a series of drawings and asked them to write stories about them. One drawing depicts a young, blond-haired boy sitting by himself in the open doorway of an old, wooden house. The sun is shining on the boy, but a shadow eclipses the interior of the house. Pollack was alarmed by the boys’ responses.

  “What was shocking,” he wrote, “was that sixty percent interpreted the picture as that of an abandoned boy, an isolated child or a victim of adult mistreatment”11 (emphasis in the original). Pollack saw the children’s stories as corroboration for the Gilligan/Chodorow thesis about early maternal abandonment: “The high percentage of stories featuring themes of abandonment, loneliness, and isolation, I believe, is suggestive of subconscious memories of premature traumatic separation.”12

  Pollack called his test a “modified” TAT. Modified how? He did not say. Even if it were accurate to say that the boys’ reaction to the picture suggested feelings of loneliness and isolation, it is quite a leap to attribute their response to an early separation trauma. Before concluding that the boys’ stories are the effect of premature independence from mothers, we would need to know whether other groups—say, a group of girls or of adult female psychologists—would have similarly “shocking” reactions to Pollack’s modified TAT. Pollack makes no mention of control groups. In any case, before projecting his findings onto the entire population of American boys, he would need to establish that the boys he was testing were a representative sample.

  It is worth mentioning that Pollack’s claimed discovery of an early and devastating separation trauma for boys contradicts findings of the American Psychiatric Association. Its official diagnostic guidebook, DSM-IV, says that separation anxiety disorder afflicts no more than 4 percent of children and more girls than boys. Furthermore, the disorder does not appear to be related to a premature separation from one’s mother. “Children with [this disorder],” says DSM-IV, “tend to come from families that are close knit.”13

  Pollack also expressed concern about the boys’ apparent confusion about masculinity. A high percentage of his boys agreed with statements such as:

  • “It is essential for a guy to get respect.”

  • “Men are always ready for sex.”14

  He pointed out that these are the very same boys who said they believed “men and women deserve equal pay” and “boys and girls should both be allowed to express feelings.” Pollack took these responses as evidence that the boys are hostage to a “double standard of masculinity.” He concluded, “These boys reveal a dangerous psychological fissure: a split in their sense of what it means to become a man.”15

  This is unpersuasive, to put it mildly. We might well find teenage girls telling us that “it is essential for a girl to get respect.” As for “Men are always ready for sex,” why should any psychologist find it startling that adolescent boys agree with that? There is massive evidence—anthropological, psychological, even endocrinological, abundantly corroborated by everyday experience—that males are, on the whole, primed for sex and more ready to casually engage in it than females are. And this begins in adolescence. One well-known experiment compared male and female college students’ responses to invitations to have casual sex from an attractive stranger of the opposite sex. Seventy percent of males said, “Okay, let’s do it,” and almost all seemed comfortable with the request. Of the females, 100 percent said, “No,” and a majority felt insulted by the proposal.16

  To recognize that males tend to welcome sexual opportunities is not to say that boys endorse an exploitative promiscuity. Given the biological changes boys are undergoing, their eagerness is natural and not unhealthy. On the other hand, society correctly demands that they suppress what is natural in favor of what is moral. So most parents try to teach their sons to practice responsible restraint. Pollack regards the boys’ positive response to “Men are always ready for sex” as an indication that something is deeply wrong with them. While this response may indicate some confusion among today’s young men about right and wrong, nothing in it suggests any kind of psychological disorder. Pollack’s reaction tells us more about his own limitations as a reliable guide to the nature of boys than it does about what boys are really like.

  In sum, Pollack’s paper does not present a single persuasive piece of evidence for a national boy crisis. I do not know whether “Listening to Boys’ Voices” was ever submitted for publication in a professional journal. Its sparse data and its strident and implausible conclusions render it unpublishable as a scholarly article.

  Why did a research institute such as McLean give what amounts to a seal of approval to such dubious research? The press release speaks of “findings” and “correlations” and gives readers the impression that “Listening to Boys’ Voices” is a study that meets McLean/Harvard standards for responsible, data-backed research. McLean requires investigators to submit research projects to a twelve-member institutional review board for approval. According to Geena Murphy, a member of this board, approval is granted “on the basis of the study’s scientific merit.”

  Pollack’s study, with its outsized claims and lack of evidence, could hardly have been approved on the basis of scientific merit. How did it get past the board? In conversations with psychiatrists, I learned that because of managed care, hospitals, administrators, and staff are continuously looking for ways to generate revenue and publicity for their institutions. Members of the McLean Institutional Review Board might have decided that an attention-grabbing “boys-are-in-crisis study” produced by its own “Center for Men,” would bring favorable attention to the hospital. If so, scientific merit, usually indispensable for a McLean study, may have been compromised.

  I asked Dr. Bruce Cohen, chief psychiatrist at McLean, how Pollack’s “research” had managed to receive McLean’s endorsement and was told, “I prefer not to talk about this at this time.” Had he read Pollack’s study? I asked. “I don’t read every study that comes out of McLean,” he answered. I explained that this study was quite unusual. Pollack claims to have uncovered a national crisis; his findings are “unprecedented in the literature of research psychology.” Surely that must have come to Dr. Cohen’s notice. I asked how it was that, without having reviewed Pollack’s evidence, McLean had issued a press release giving Pollack’s work the cachet of genuine science. Cohen told me someone would get back to me. But before he hung up, I asked him for his opinion “as a clinician” of Pollack’s description of the nation’s boys as “young Hamlets who succumb to an inner state of Denmark.” “That’s in there?” he asked, in the worried tone of a high
school principal inquiring about what seniors have put in the yearbook.

  The next day, I received a call from Roberta Shaw, director of public relations at McLean. She explained that the decision to issue a press release had been based on the “news value” of the study. “We ask ourselves, ‘Is it of public interest?’ ” She also assured me that Pollack “had several journals interested in publishing his study.” She didn’t know what they were. She suggested I call him directly. I did, but he never returned the call.

  Universities such as Harvard are clearly uncomfortable with the use of their names to confer prestige on dubious work. In October 1998, Harvard announced a new policy barring faculty members from labeling their work as sponsored or endorsed by Harvard without the express permission of the dean or provost. As the Associated Press reported, “Many institutions in the Ivy League have found themselves . . . linked to disputed data or research.”17 Yale faced the same problem, and now anyone who wants to use the phrase “Yale University study” must get permission from the university’s director of licensing. McLean might consider establishing a similar requirement for its researchers.

  The Media Blitz

  Even before the shootings in Littleton, Colorado, news organizations around the country were carrying stories about new research on the nation’s anguished boys, citing Harvard and McLean scholars as authorities. In March 1998, the Washington Post ran a front-page story about the “plight of young males.” It quoted Barney Brawer, Carol Gilligan’s former partner at the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology, Boys’ Development and the Culture of Manhood, who said, “An enormous crisis of men and boys is happening before our eyes without our seeing it . . . an extraordinary shift in the plate tectonics of gender.”18

  In a May 1998 Newsweek cover story on boys, Pollack warned readers, “Boys are in silent crisis. The only time we notice is when they pull the trigger.”19 ABC’s 20/20 aired a segment on Pollack and his disturbing message, “Why Boys Hide Their Emotions.”20 People ran a profile of Pollack in which he explained how boys who massacre their schoolmates are the “tip of the iceberg, the extreme end of one large crisis.”21

  On July 15, 1998, Maria Shriver interviewed Pollack on the NBC Today show. He informed the program’s mass audience of the results of his research:

  Shriver: You say there is really a silent crisis going on with, quote, “normal boys.” As a parent of a young boy, that concerns me, scares me a lot.

  Pollack: Well, absolutely. In addition to the national crisis, the boys who pick up guns, the boys who are suicidal and homicidal, the boys next door or the boy living in the room next door is also, I have found in my research, isolated, feeling lonely, can’t express his feelings. And that happens because of the way we bring boys up.

  Pollack’s easy slide from “boys who pick up guns” to “the boy next door”—who, he assures us, are not very different inside—scared a lot of parents. This slide from abnormal boys to normal ones is, of course, illegitimate. There is not a shred of evidence in Pollack’s research that justifies his “tip of the iceberg,” “boys-are-in-crisis” hypothesis. Yet Pollack tossed it into the media echo chamber.

  In an earlier interview (March 28), Jack Ford, the cohost of NBC’s Saturday Today, asked Pollack, “Should I sit down with my eleven-year-old son and say to him, ‘Look at what happened here down in Arkansas. Let me tell you why. Part of it is your makeup, part of it is how we’ve been bringing you up. Now let’s sort of work through this together,’ or is it too late for that?”

  Pollack did not tell Ford that it would be wrong to suggest to his son that he too is capable of killing people. Instead he replied: “I think we should do that with eleven-year-old boys. I think we should start with two- and three- and four- and five-year-old boys and not push them . . . from their mothers.”22

  This is a remarkable exchange—one that would be inconceivable if the children under discussion were girls. No one takes disturbed young women like Susan Smith (who made headlines in 1994 when she drowned her two sons by pushing her car into a lake) or Melissa Drexler (the New Jersey teenager who, in 1997, gave birth to a healthy baby at her senior prom, strangled him, and threw him in a trash bin) as tip-of-the-iceberg exemplars of American young women. Girl criminals are never taken to be representative of girls in general. But when the boy reformers generalize from school killers to “our sons,” they’re including your son and mine as well as Jack Ford’s and Maria Shriver’s. Would it ever occur to Jack Ford to ask a psychologist whether he should sit down with his daughter and say to her, “Look at what happened at that New Jersey prom . . . Part of it is your makeup, part of it is how we’ve been bringing you up. Now let’s sort of work through this together”?

  Pollack sees the killer boys at the extreme end of a continuum that includes “everyday boys.” To the contrary, what is typically striking about killer boys is their extreme abnormality. Thirteen-year-old Mitchell Johnson, one of the two Jonesboro, Arkansas, shooters, practiced self-mutilation and was also undergoing court-ordered psychological counseling for molesting a two-year old girl.23 Kip Kinkel, the fifteen-year-old boy who shot classmates in Springfield, Oregon, had been diagnosed with major depressive disorder. The night before the school shooting, he killed his parents and spent the night in his house with their dead bodies, playing opera music from Romeo and Juliet continuously. As for the Columbine High killers, they were sociopaths inspired by the example of Timothy McVeigh, the domestic terrorist who blew up the Oklahoma City Federal Building, killing 168 people and injuring 680.24

  By putting all boys “pushed from their mothers” onto a continuum with the school shooters, Pollack does not adequately distinguish between healthy and unhealthy young men. Before we call for radical changes in the way we rear our male children, we ought to ask the boy reformers to tell us why there are so many seemingly healthy boys who, despite having been “pushed from their mothers,” are nonviolent, morally responsible human beings. How do those who say boys are disturbed account for the fact that in any given year less than one half of 1 percent of males under eighteen are arrested for a violent crime?25

  With the help of the media, Pollack’s explanation for adolescent male violence in schools contributes to the national climate of prejudice against boys. That is surely not his intention. It is, however, an inevitable consequence of his sensationalizing approach to boys—treating healthy boys as if they were abnormal and abnormal, lethally violent boys as “the extreme end of one large pattern.”26

  A Nation of Hamlets and Ophelias

  In regarding seemingly normal children as abnormally afflicted, Pollack was taking the well-trodden path pioneered by Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher. Gilligan had described the nation’s girls as drowning, disappearing, traumatized, and undergoing various kinds of “psychological foot-binding.” Following Gilligan, Mary Pipher, in Reviving Ophelia, had written of the selves of girls going down in flames, “crashing and burning.” Pollack’s Real Boys continues in this vein: “Hamlet fared little better than Ophelia. . . . He grew increasingly isolated, desolate, and alone, and those who loved him were never able to get through to him. In the end he died a tragic and unnecessary death.”27

  By using Ophelia and Hamlet as symbols, Pipher and Pollack paint a picture of American children as disturbed and in need of rescue. But once one discounts the anecdotal, scientifically vacuous reports that have issued from the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the McLean Hospital’s Center for Men, there remains no reason to believe that girls or boys are in crisis. Mainstream researchers see no evidence of it.28 To be sure, adolescence is a time of some “inner turmoil”—for boys and girls, in America and everywhere else, from time immemorial. But American children, boys as well as girls, are on the whole psychologically sound. They are not isolated, full of despair, or “hiding parts of themselves from the world’s gaze”—no more so, at least, than any other age group in the population.

  One wonders why the irresponsible and baseless claims that gir
ls and boys are psychologically fractured have been so uncritically received by the media and the public. One reason, perhaps, is that Americans seem all too ready to entertain almost any suggestion that a large group of outwardly normal people are suffering from some pathological affliction. By 1999, bestselling books had successively identified women, girls, and boys as being mentally anguished and in need of rescue. Then, in late 1999, Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man called our attention to yet another segment of the population that no one had previously realized was in serious psychological trouble: adult men.29 Faludi claims to have unmasked a “masculinity crisis” so severe and pervasive, she finds it hard to understand why men do not rise up in rebellion.

  Although Faludi seems to have arrived at her view of men without having read Pollack’s analysis of boys, her conclusions about men are identical to his about boys. She claims that men are suffering because the culture imposes stultifying myths and ideals of manliness. Stiffed shows us the hapless baby-boomer males, burdened “with dangerous prescriptions of manhood,”30 trying vainly to cope with a world in which they are bound to fail. Men have been taught that “to be a man means to be at the controls and at all times to feel yourself in control.”31 They cannot live up to this stoical ideal of manliness. At the same time, our “misogynist culture” now imposes its humiliating “ornamental” demands on men as well as women. “No wonder,” says Faludi, “men are in such agony.”32

  What is Faludi’s evidence of an “American masculinity crisis”? She talked to dozens of unhappy men, among them wife batterers in Long Beach, California, distressed male pornography stars, and teenage sex predators known as the Spur Posse. Most of Faludi’s subjects have sad stories to tell about inadequate fathers, personal alienation, and feelings of helplessness. But she never tells us why the disconsolate men she selected for attention should be regarded as representative.