The War Against Boys (12 page)

From the standpoint of reality, nothing seems more unlikely. Most little girls don't want to play with trucks, as almost any parent can attest. Including me: when my son gave his daughter Eliza a toy train, she placed it in a baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some sleep.

Valian has heard this sort of objection many times, and she has an answer. She does not deny that sex differences have some foundation in biology, but she insists that culture can intensify or diminish their power and effect. Even if Eliza is prompted by nature to interact with the train in a stereotypical female way, that is no reason for her father not to energetically correct her behavior. “We don't,” says Valian, “accept biology as destiny. . . . We vaccinate, we inoculate, we medicate. . . . I propose we adopt the same attitude toward biological sex differences.”
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Few would deny that parents and teachers should expose children to a wide range of toys and play activities. And Valian is right when she says that culture can intensify or diminish our natural inclinations. But gender identity is notoriously difficult to change. As one neuroscientist, Lise Eliot, observes, “[I]t is a potent, irreversible piece of self-knowledge that crystalizes children's perceptions and choice about much in their world, creating pink and blue barriers that parents find difficult to maneuver around.”
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In the
hands of little boys, toy baby carriages will be catapulted from the roofs of dollhouses. In the hands of little girls, toy trains will be nurtured. Nothing short of radical and sustained behavior modification could change these elemental play preferences. Is it worth it? Is it even ethical?

We vaccinate, inoculate, and medicate children against
disease
. Being a typical little boy or girl is not a pathology in need of a cure. Failure to protect children from smallpox, diphtheria, or measles places them in harm's way. There is no such harm in allowing male/female differences to flourish in early childhood. The resocializers talk of “gender apartheid,” of the schoolyard as a training ground for incipient batterers, of conventional masculinity as toxic. For Valian, the gender system is a source of massive social injustice. But these are all extravagant exaggerations. These would-be reformers completely ignore or discount all the good achieved by a tolerant policy that allows the sexes to freely pursue their different styles of play. More than that, this movement to change children's concept of themselves is invasive and authoritarian.

Gender-variant children (once called “tomboy girls” and “sissy boys” in the medical literature) are a lesson to us all. These children are powerfully drawn to the toys of the opposite sex. They will often persist in playing with the “wrong” toys despite relentless pressure from parents, peers, and doctors. There was a time when a boy who behaved like William in
William's Doll
would have been considered mentally ill and subject to behavior modification therapy. Today, we have developed more enlightened and compassionate attitudes. Most experts encourage tolerance, understanding, and acceptance.
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But surely the same tolerance and understanding should extend to the gender identity and preferences of the vast majority of children.

On March 21, 2005, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University hosted a conference entitled Impediments to Change: Revisiting the Women in Science Question. The auditorium in Agassiz Theatre in Radcliffe Yard was packed. Dedicated in 1904, the theater has been the site
of many a spirited intellectual exchange. But this conference was a forum not for debate but for indignation over (then) Harvard president Lawrence Summers's speculation that innate differences between the sexes might be one reason there are fewer women than men at the highest echelons of math and science.

The six panelists—four from Harvard, two from MIT—did not challenge one another in the fashion of typical academic seminars, but rather repeated and reinforced a common conviction that there is only one possible explanation for why fewer women than men teach math and physics at Harvard and MIT: sexist bias. Why were no dissenters invited? Because from the point of view of the assembled, that would be like inviting a flat-earther or a Holocaust denier. One panelist, Harvard psychologist Elizabeth Spelke, flatly declared that the case against significant inborn cognitive differences “is as conclusive as any finding I know of in science.”
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For any scholar, especially a Harvard University social scientist, to sweep aside all the evidence for innate differences defies belief. In 2010, David Geary, a University of Missouri psychologist, published
Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences.
This thorough, fair-minded, and comprehensive survey of the literature includes more than fifty pages of footnotes citing studies by neuroscientists, endocrinologists, geneticists, anthropologists, and psychologists showing a strong biological basis for many gender differences.
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While these particular studies may not be the final word, they cannot be dismissed or ignored.

Nor can human reality be tossed aside. In all known societies, women have better verbal skills, and men excel at spatial reasoning.
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Women tend to be the nurturers and men the warriors. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker points to the absurdity of ascribing these universal differences to socialization: “It would be an amazing coincidence that in every society the coin flip that assigns each sex to one set of roles would land the same way.”
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A recent study on sex differences by researchers from the University of Turin and the University of Manchester confirms what most of us see with our eyes: despite some exceptions, women tend to be more sensitive, esthetic, sentimental, intuitive, and tender-minded; while men tend to be
more utilitarian, objective, unsentimental, and tough-minded.
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It is true that we do not yet fully understand the precise biological underpinnings of these universal tendencies, but that is no reason to deny they exist. And there are many tantalizing theories.

Consider, for example, Cambridge University's Simon Baron-Cohen. He is one of the world's leading experts on autism, a disorder that affects far more males than females. Individuals with autism tend to be socially disconnected and unaware of the emotional states of others. But they often exhibit obsessive fixation on objects and machines. Baron-Cohen suggests that autism may be the far end of the male norm, or the “extreme male brain.” He believes that men are, “on average,” wired to be better “systematizers” and women to be better “empathizers.”
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It is a daring claim—but he has data to back it up, presenting a wide range of correlations between the level of fetal testosterone and behaviors in both girls and boys from infancy into grade school.

It is hard not to be attracted to theories like Simon Baron-Cohen's when one looks at the way children play and how men and women are distributed in the workplace. After two major waves of feminism, women still predominate—sometimes overwhelmingly—in empathy-centered fields such as early-childhood education,
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social work,
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nursing,
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and psychology
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; while men are overrepresented in the “systematizing” vocations such as car repair,
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oil drilling,
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and electrical engineering.
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And there are no signs that boys are going to surrender their trucks, rockets, and weapons for glittery lavender ponies anytime soon.

Harvard psychologist Marc Hauser has what seems to be the appropriate attitude about the research on sex differences: respectful, intrigued but also cautious. When asked about Baron-Cohen's work, Hauser said, “I am sympathetic . . . and find it odd that anyone would consider the work controversial.”
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Hauser referred to research that shows, for example, that if asked to make a drawing, little girls almost always create scenes with at least one person, while males nearly always draw things—cars, rockets, or trucks. And he mentioned that among primates—including our closest relations, the chimpanzees—males are more technologically innovative, while females
are more involved in details of family life. Still, Hauser warns that a lot of seemingly exciting and promising research on sex differences has not panned out and urges us to treat the biological theories with caution.
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Clearly, gender differences are driven by some yet-to-be understood interaction between culture and biology. And we must always bear in mind that no one is claiming that
all
men and women embody the tendencies of their sexes: some girls have superb spatial reasoning skills and little interest in nurturing, while some males reject rough-and-tumble play and prefer calm, imaginative games. When we speak of gender differences, we are referring to statistical differences between groups, not the rigid determination of individuals. If we say, for example, that women tend to enjoy romance novels more than men do, we are not saying that
all
women enjoy them. Hauser is right that we need to proceed with care.

But where is that care where the social constructionists are concerned? Though their research appears to be going nowhere, they are still marching ahead with their workshops, curriculum guides, and tutorials. Confident in their theories, they have taken on the task of resocializing the American child.

There is much to be learned from classrooms where teachers are actively attacking the schemas of their pupils. Peggy Orenstein's
SchoolGirls: Young Women, Self-Esteem, and the Confidence Gap
was written in association with the American Association of University Women.
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Just after the AAUW had alerted the country to the plight of its shortchanged adolescent girls, Orenstein visited several middle schools to see firsthand how they were coping with the “confidence gap.” As a trusted insider, Orenstein was given full access to classrooms that were “raising the gender consciousness” of students. From her detailed report, we get a good understanding of how the new gender-fair activists view boys and what they have in mind for them.

The climatic section of
SchoolGirls
is entitled “Anita Hill Is a Boy: Tales from a Gender-Fair Classroom.” Orenstein describes the classroom of Ms.
Judy Logan, an award-winning English and social studies teacher at the Everett Middle School, a public school in San Francisco. Logan has gone as far as anyone in transforming her classroom into a woman-centered community of learners. Indeed, Logan is something of a pedagogical legend among girl-partisan activists. Jackie DeFazio, former president of the AAUW, says that a teacher like Logan, “who puts equity at the center of her classroom,” fills her with hope.
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Mary Pipher, author of
Reviving Ophelia,
praises Logan for offering “a new vision of what our schools can give to our children.”
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When Orenstein stepped into Logan's classroom for the first time she found it “somewhat of a shock.” There are images of women everywhere:

The faces of Abigail Adams, Rachel Carson, Faye Wattleton, and even a fanciful “Future Woman” smile out from three student-made quilts that are draped on the walls. . . . Reading racks overflow with biographies of Lucretia Mott, Ida B. Wells, Emma Goldman, Sally Ride, and Rigoberta Menchú. . . . There is a section on Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes. . . . A giant computer-paper banner spans the width of another wall proclaiming, “Women are one-half of the world's people, they do two-thirds of the world's work, they earn one-tenth of the world's income; they own one hundredth of the world's property.”
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At first, Orenstein found herself wondering “Where are the men?” But then in one of those characteristic “click” moments that feminists often report, the light dawned and all was clear: “In Ms. Logan's class, girls may be dazzled by the reflection of the women that surround them. And, perhaps for the first time, the boys are the ones looking through the window.”
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Logan's classes are unusual and fun. She is popular with her students. But, according to Orenstein, many students complain that she is unfair to boys. One sixth grader, Holly, says, “Sometimes, I worry about the boys, that they kind of get ignored.” Another says that her brother had taken one of Ms. Logan's classes, and “all she ever talked about was women, women, women. And he did not like it.” Even the girls get tired of all the “women-centeredness.” Orenstein reports one as complaining, “Ms. Logan,
I feel like I am not learning anything about men, and I do not think that is right.” Orenstein attributes the girls' objections to their low self-esteem; because of the “hidden curriculum,” girls “have already become used to taking up less space, to feeling less worthy of attention than boys.” By contrast, one older student, Mindy, who spent three years with Logan (Orenstein describes her as “a model of grunge chic”), has clearly learned the lessons that Logan strives to impart. Here is how this student explains the boys' resentment:

I think it's the resentment of losing their place. In our other classes, the teachers just focus on men, but the boys don't complain that that's sexist. They say, “It's different in those classes because we focus on the important people in history, who just happen to be men.”
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As Orenstein describes her, Mindy rolls her eyes to indicate the incredible cluelessness of the boys. Mindy's reference to those other classes shows she has, indeed, learned her lesson well. The new pedagogy justifies its intense focus on women by reminding us that allegedly gender-neutral classes on such subjects as the Age of Discovery or the Rise of Science are “all about men” like Columbus and Isaac Newton. Now it is time to put women in their rightful place at the center of attention.