The War Against Boys (20 page)

Gilligan's views are attractive to many who believe that boys could profit by being more sensitive and empathetic. But before parents and educators enlist in Gilligan's project, they would do well to note that her central thesis—that boys are being imprisoned by their conventional masculinity—is not a scientific hypothesis. It is an extravagant piece of speculative psychology of the kind that sometimes finds acceptance in schools of education but is not creditable in most departments of psychology.

Gilligan talks about radically reforming “the fundamental structure of authority” by freeing boys from the masculine stereotypes that bind them. But in what sense are American boys unfree? Was the young Mark Twain or the young Teddy Roosevelt enslaved by conventional modes of boyhood? Is the average Little Leaguer or Cub Scout defective in the ways suggested by Gilligan? It is certainly true that a small subset of male children fit Gilligan's description of being desensitized and cut off from feelings of tenderness and care. However, these boys are not representative of the male sex. Gilligan speaks of boys “hiding their humanity” and showing a capacity to “hurt without feeling hurt.” This, she maintains, is a general condition brought about because the vast majority of boys are forced into separation from their nurturers. But the idea that boys are abnormally insensitive flies in the face of everyday experience. Boys are competitive and often rowdy. But anyone in close contact with them—parents, grandparents, teachers, coaches, friends—gets daily proof of most boys' humanity, loyalty, and compassion.

Gilligan appears to be making the same mistake with boys that she made with girls. She observes a few children and interprets their problems as indicative of a deep and general malaise caused by the way our society imposes sex-role stereotypes on them. By adolescence, she concludes, the pressure to meet these stereotypes has impaired, distressed, and deformed both sexes. However, most boys are not violent. Most are not unfeeling or antisocial. Gilligan finds boys lacking in empathy, but does she empathize with them?

We have yet to see a single reasonable argument for radically reforming the identities of boys and girls. As I argued in chapter 3, there is no reason to believe that such reform is achievable, but even if it were, the attempt to obtrude on boys and girls at this level of their natures is ethically questionable.

Consider, finally, Gilligan's criticism of how American boys are initiated into a patriarchal social order that valorizes heroism, honor, war, and competition. In Gilligan's world, the military man is one of the potent and deplorable stereotypes that “the culture of manhood” holds up to boys as a male ideal. But her criticism of military culture is flawed. First, the military ethos that Gilligan castigates as insensitive and uncaring is probably less influential in the lives of American boys today than at most periods in our history. At the same time, it needs to be pointed out, our military and its culture are nothing to be ashamed of. Indeed, if you want to cite an American institution that inculcates high levels of human concern, cooperation, and sacrifice, you could aptly choose the military.

Anyone who has firsthand knowledge of American military personnel knows that most are highly competent, self-disciplined, honorable, and moral men and women ready to risk their lives for their country. Gilligan and her followers are confused about military ethics. Yes, the military “valorizes” honor, competition, and winning. Offering no reasons for impugning these values, which in fact are necessary for an effective life, she contents herself with insinuating that they are dehumanizing by contrast with the values she admires: cooperation, caring, self-sacrifice. To suggest that the military ethic promotes callousness and heedlessness is deeply wrong. To accuse the military of being uncaring is to ignore the selflessness and camaraderie that make the martial ethos so attractive to those who intensely desire to live lives of high purpose and service.

The historian Stephen Ambrose, who spent half his career listening to the stories of soldiers, tells of a course on the Second World War he gave at the University of Wisconsin in 1996 to an overflow class of 350. Most
students were unfamiliar with the salient events of that war. According to Ambrose, “They were dumbstruck by descriptions of what it was like to be on the front lines. They were even more amazed by the responsibilities carried by junior officers . . . who were as young as they . . . they wondered how anyone could have done it.”
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Ambrose tried to explain to them what brought so many men and women to such feats of courage, such levels of excellence. He told them it hadn't been anything abstract. It had involved two things: “unit cohesion”—a concern for the safety and well-being of their soldier comrades that equaled and sometimes exceeded their concern for their own well-being—and an understanding of the moral dimensions of the fight: “At the core, the American citizen soldiers knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn't want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed. So they fought, and won, and we all of us, living and yet to be born, must be forever profoundly grateful.”
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What Ambrose understands and Gilligan does not is that the ethic of duty encompasses the ethic of care. The martial virtues of honor, duty, and self-sacrifice are caring virtues, and it is wrong to deride them as lesser virtues. Gilligan's depreciation of the military is standard among certain academics. Ambrose says that after he finished college in the late 1950s, he too shared the anti-military, anti-business snobbery that prevails in many universities today. He writes:

By the time I was a graduate student, I was full of scorn for [ex-GIs]. . . . But in fact these were the men who built modern America. They had learned to work together in the armed services in World War II. They had seen enough destruction: they wanted to construct. They built the Interstate Highway system, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the suburbs. . . . They had seen enough killing; they wanted to save lives. They licked polio and made other revolutionary advances in medicine. They had learned in the army the virtues of a solid organization and teamwork, and the value of individual initiative, inventiveness, and responsibility.
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What are we to make of Carol Gilligan's contribution and influence? Her earlier work on the different moral voices of males and females had some merit; her demand that psychologists and philosophers take into account the possibility that women and men have different styles of moral reasoning was original and interesting. As it turns out, the differences are less important than Gilligan predicted. All the same, her suggestive ideas on sex and moral psychology stimulated an important discussion. For that she deserves recognition.

Her later work on adolescent girls and their “silenced” voices shows us a different Gilligan. Her ideas were successful in the sense that they inspired activists in organizations like the AAUW and the Ms. Foundation to go on red alert in an effort to save the nation's “drowning and disappearing” daughters. But all their activism was based on a false premise: that girls were subdued, neglected, and diminished. In fact, the opposite was true: girls were moving ahead of boys in most of the ways that count. Gilligan's powerful myth of the incredible shrinking girl did more harm than good. It patronized girls, portraying them as victims of the culture. It diverted attention from the academic deficits of boys. It also gave urgency and credibility to a specious self-esteem movement that wasted everybody's time.

Gilligan's later work on boys is even more removed from reality. The myth of the emotionally repressed boy was taken seriously by many educators and lead to insipid, dispiriting school programs designed to get boys in touch with their feelings. More ominously, it lead to increasingly aggressive efforts to insist that boys behave more like girls—for their own sakes and for the supposed good of society. In this call for deliverance, Gilligan has been joined by some prominent male disciples—with their own research, extravagant claims, and proposals for rescuing a nation of stricken young Hamlets.

O
n June 4, 1998, McLean Hospital, the psychiatric teaching hospital of the Harvard Medical School, announced the results of a new study of boys.
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The press release, headlined “Adolescence Is Time of Crisis for Even ‘Healthy' Boys,” reported that researchers at McLean and Harvard Medical had found that “psychologically ‘healthy' middle-class boys” are anxious, alienated, lonely, and isolated—“despite appearing outwardly content.”
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The study, “Listening to Boys' Voices,” was conducted by Dr. William Pollack, codirector of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Pollack, a psychologist, had already come out with a book publicizing the report's dismaying findings, entitled
Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood.
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Real Boys
was moderately successful before the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999. But it really took off when a startled public, hungry for expert counsel on the rash of school shootings, saw in Pollack a confident authority. He appeared on
Oprah, CBS This Morning
, and
Dateline NBC
to explain his discovery that a silent crisis was engulfing American boys. He joined Vice President Al Gore on CNN's
Larry King Live
for a program dedicated to understanding school violence. Among Pollack's many speeches
in the Columbine aftermath were a May 1999 keynote address to a convention of more than fourteen hundred Texas elementary school counselors and a June address to two thousand PTA leaders in Portland, Oregon.
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Referring to boys as “Ophelia's brothers,” Pollack tried to do for boys what Carol Gilligan and Mary Pipher had done for girls: bring news of their diminished and damaged young lives to a large public.
Real Boys
stayed on the
New York Times
bestseller list for more than six months. What sort of research findings did Pollack provide in support of his disturbing portrait? Let's go back to the McLean announcement of his discovery. The press release listed the study's major findings. Among them:

• “As boys mature, they feel increased pressure to conform to an aggressive dominant male stereotype, which leads to low self-esteem and high incidence of depression.”

• “Boys feel significant anxiety and sadness about growing up to be men.”

• “Despite appearing outwardly content, many boys feel deep feelings of loneliness and alienation.”

We must bear in mind that Pollack is not talking about a small percentage of boys who are seriously disturbed and lethally dangerous. He is attributing pathology to normal boys, and his conclusions are expansive. “These findings,” he said, “carry massive implications for what appears to be a larger national crisis, one that we are now seeing can occasion serious violence.”
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This national emergency called for a major social reform: “The time has come to change the way boys are raised—in our homes, in our schools and in society.”
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It is unusual to find such sensational claims and recommendations issued from a staid research institution such as McLean. McLean is routinely ranked among the top three psychiatric hospitals in the United States, and its research program is the best endowed and largest of any private psychiatric hospital in the country. Any study bearing its imprimatur receives and deserves respectful attention. But this one strained credulity.

I requested a copy of “Listening to Boys' Voices” from McLean. A few days later, a thirty-page typed manuscript arrived. It had not been published, nor was it marked as about to be published. It had none of the usual properties of a professional research paper. Unlike most scientific papers, which alert readers to their limits, Pollack's was unabashedly extravagant, declaring that “these findings about boys are unprecedented in the literature of research psychology.”
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Pollack said he had been moved to do his research on boys in great part because of the “startling findings” of Gilligan and others on girls, which had awakened “our nation . . . from its gender slumbers,” alerting us to “the plight of adolescent girls lacking for voice and a coherent sense of self . . . many sinking into a depressive joyless existence.” Except for Pollack's adulatory references to Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow for their “profound insights,” the manuscript contained not a single footnote referencing “the literature of research psychology” to which he was making an unprecedented addition, or any other prior research. And his own research, interpretations, and reporting were eerily similar to Gilligan's loose, impressionistic methods.

Pollack's discovery of a boy crisis with national implications was based on a battery of vaguely described tests administered to 150 boys. He gives no explanation of how the boys had been selected or whether they constituted anything like a representative sample. And even if we disregard the limitations of the database, the findings appeared on first impression to be anything but grim and unprecedented.

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.”
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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.”
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