...from a woman who has spent countless hours hostage to fortune to a man driving around ignoring the map saying "I can find it! I can find it!"

I always think that articles about how boys do poorly in school because the education system advantages girls are really funny--since when has most school NOT required that students sit still, pay attention, and memorize stuff? Ever since the days of boarding schools in England and the one-room schoolhouse on the prairie, children have been asked to sit still, pay attention, and memorize stuff. And no one thought that it was disadvantageous for boys--indeed, boys outperformed girls. Now that girls sometimes outperform boys, suddenly we find that the system we had all along, the system that was developed when most, if not all, students were boys is gender-biased?

B.S.

While I'm not saying that there are no differences between the sexes, we need to be careful about what we do with them, and how quick we are to spot them. It used to be thought that women lacked the self-control, discipline, and stamina to excel at serious study, but no one suggested changing the educational system. Now suddenly it's boys who lack the necessary innate traits to excel at school? So now we're supposed to change things for them? Maybe the difference isn't all innate gender traits, but alterations in how children are raised: exposure to television, parental discipline and expectations, etc.

What's the point of the post? Why is the article described as interesting but nevertheless ridiculed? Is there something wrong with the science? Is there science behind the observations about fine motor skills and following maps? If there is, what's the overheated sarcasm about?

Why is this post so nasty? Who is she angry at? The entire thing makes no sense.

Ask the Women Who Pee Standing Up. (http://www.ampnet.co.uk/femorabilia/pee_standing.html)

It is hilarious that classic literature written by women (i.e. Jane Eyre) has been denigrated as "uninteresting" to boys. How is this aspect of the gender divide (their boredom) more significant than the tremendous social hurdles overcome by the female authors themselves?

Hysterical. (Ha! Hyster! Crazy women!) There are so few major women writers from before the 1900's. To ignore their contributions to literature because the boys don't find their work interesting is to perpetuate the same cultural paradigm that made it so hard for female authors to gain prominence in the first place.

You know, us females deal with "boring dude stuff" in school all the time - we read The Red Badge of Courage and Hemingway and the piles and piles of male-centric literature. We take art history and look at the nude women painted by the male painters. We study film history and see films told by male directors from a male protagonist's view.

And if we complain about all of this male-ness, we're labeled as shrieking harpies, or worse - Feminists. Meanwhile, frickin' child-tutoring Jane Eyre fails to please the boys, so the education police have to come out and investigate the threat posed to male students? Answer me this, David Brooks and slacker teenage males everywhere - would you prefer the Wide Sargasso Sea? You can just focus on the exoticism and sex parts, and ignore the message about women-as-chattle.

Heathcliff, the male lead in *Wuthering Heights* is a brooding, alienated puppy-killer. I bet it's because they didn't let him color with the black crayon.

I have no beef with the raw data, at least not without knowing anything about the methodology of the study. However, inferences from the data are another thing entirely. Consider the following excerpt:

"Men and women picked out fearful faces with equal facility, but men were significantly faster than women when asked to find the angry face.

"Qazi Rahman, a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Psychiatry of King's College London who has written widely about sexuality and human sex differences but was not involved in this study, praised the study and said that the results were not a surprise.

"'This elegant study," he said, "found precisely what we would predict from sexual selection theory — an evolutionary theory that predicts specific differences between male and female organisms — in that anger in the male face would be detected rapidly by other males to whom such cues might have had very real survival consequences.'"

This is an irrational conclusion unless we suppose that "such cues" would NOT have "very real" survival consequences for women. This not only defies common sense, but contradicts the authors' conclusion, earlier in the article, that the reason both sexes find it relatively difficult to identify anger in the female face is that men are more threatening than women -- which rests on the premise that women, like men, are threatened by (angry) men.

Classic. Good going. In true female fashion, you did not actually deal with the question at hand -- instead, you changed the subject, and turned the discussion into how much of a victim you and your gender are. That does two things simultaneously -- it prevents any kind of reasoned discussion of the actual issue, and it puts anyone who disagrees with you on the defensive. Bravo.

The issue, apparently, is whether or not boys do less well than girls in school because the educational system and processes are biased against boys' natural tendencies and nature, and in favor of girls. Instead of having something to say about that, you simply say, in effect, "Who cares? Look how much girls suffer! Shut up, boys."

Okay, here's a big idea for you, dear. Ready? What boys experience and what girls experience are TWO SEPARATE SUBJECTS. That's right! Usually, if you want to get anywhere with an issue, you have to keep thinking and talking about it.

If someone wants to start a discussion about how the educational establishment is biased against girls (which has been done to death, for literally decades) then have at it. But if that's not the topic at hand, then what girls experience in education is ... ready? Irrelevant. Unless, of course, you don't want the issue to be discussed at all, in which case, various versions of "Who cares?" are an excellent way to shut it down completely.

By the way, I have a degree in English Literature with honors from one of the best colleges in the country, and I cannot make it through Pride and Prejudice and stay awake. I've tried.