Letters to the Editor

• "War on Boys" is like "Patriarchy"...

  [Read the article: Pollitt takes a swipe at the "war on boys"]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  The "Patriarchy", as a term applying to the oppression of women in society, always made me think it was trying to talk about a secret cabal of middle-aged white men in suits sitting around smoking cigars in a boardroom brainstorming about how to keep The Woman down.

  Sexism arises from society. Men and women contribute equally. The people who raise the children bear a significant part of the responsibility for what the children think about just about everything, including gender. There was never a secret cabal trying to keep women down; female oppression arose from a variety of societal forces.

  There's no secret cabal of middle-aged feminists in New York smart pantsuits sitting around in a boardroom sipping lattes and trying to figure out how to keep The Man down, either. The social forces that are hurting boys are real, but they are not specifically out to get boys for the most part. Some of them are forces that are trying to help girls, and assuming boys don't need the help, or assuming that if boys could just act more like girls they'd do fine. Some of them aren't gender-specific at all. Cutting recess? Cutting gym? As several posters have pointed out, these are harder on boys than girls, but it's done because schools are underfunded and forced to pass standardized tests. Medicating boys with Ritalin? ADD/ADHD is a real syndrome, but there's no gold standard for diagnosis, no biological factor you can look at and say "Yes, this kid really has ADD; no, this kid is just bored." So it's really, really easy to misdiagnose a highly active child, or fail to diagnose a daydreamy, quiet child; thus boys are overmedicated and girls are undermedicated/undertreated. Female-only teachers? Always been that way, but possibly worse now that there's so much hysteria over sex offenders. Men generally don't choose really low-paid professions, and our society still denigrates care of young children as unworthy of high pay, because it's women's work. So sexism against women -- if women do it most of the time, it can't be worth much -- works against men -- I wish I could get a job as an elementary school teacher, but it pays too little and because my *wife* has a job that's low-paid and denigrated as woman's work, I can't afford to. And that works against boys -- my teachers don't understand me 'cause they're all girls.

  Entertainment for children is a lot less reading-dominated, but literacy skills are desperately in demand for adults in an information society. Boys were never as good at reading as girls were, but when reading was the only game in town and the girls were told that if they read too much boys wouldn't want to date them, female superiority in this area was masked. Now it's out in the open, and if we're as good at dealing with it as we've been with the male advantage in mathematical ability, boys are screwed. Tiny, tiny differences that may be biological -- a 3-5% average differential -- get magnified by culture -- "girls" aren't good at math, "boys" aren't good at reading, as if a 5% difference were 100%. The more boys feel like boys aren't supposed to be good at reading or at school, the worse boys will do.

  There is no War on Boys. One could argue that there's a War On Children, and so far, boys have taken the most casualties, but no one is out to get boys. Feminists, you may have noticed, do not run the country, or even school boards in most places. But there are a lot of social forces that put together are hurting males. And the terrifying thing is this: in every single culture humanity has ever had, men define whatever belongs to masculinity as better than whatever belongs to femininity. If being male means dressing up pretty, then men think dressing up pretty is better than not dressing up pretty. If being male means hunting buffalo, then men think hunting buffalo is better than not hunting buffalo. And if being male means being dumb and uneducated, American men are going to move toward a position of believing that being dumb and uneducated is better than being smart, and god knows, America is too damn close to that point already. And since feminism and any rights for women are totally dependent on education and civilization, feminists *need* to be concerned about this trend and need to fight it. Being smart won't help us if our brothers decide that the ability to beat each other and us up was more important than getting an education, after all.

  Permalink Sunday, January 22, 2006 12:49 PM