The War Against Boys (22 page)

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?
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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 girls 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.
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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,”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.

If men are experiencing the agonies Faludi speaks of, they are doing so with remarkable equanimity. The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, which has been tracking levels of general happiness and life satisfaction since 1957, consistently finds that approximately 90 percent of Americans describe themselves as happy with their lives, with no significant differences between men and women.
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When I asked its survey director, Tom Smith, if there had been any unusual signs of distress among men in the last few decades—the years in which Faludi claims that a generation of men have seen “all their hopes and dreams burn up on the launch pad.”
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Smith replied, “There have been no trends in a negative direction during those years.” But Faludi believes otherwise and joins Gilligan, Pollack, and the others in calling for a “new paradigm” of how to be men.

Faludi cites the work of Dr. Darrel Regier, director of the Division of Epidemiology at the National Institute of Mental Health, to support her thesis that men are increasingly unhappy.
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I asked Dr. Regier what he thought of her men-are-in-distress claim. “I am not sure where she gets her evidence for any substantial rise in male distress.” He was surprised that one of his own 1988 studies was cited by Faludi as evidence for an increase in “anxiety, depressive disorders, suicide.” “Well,” Dr. Regier said, “that is a fallacy. The article shows no such thing.”
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What does he think of these false mental health scares? I asked. “I guess they sell books,” he said.

Apocalyptic alarms about looming mental health disasters do sell well. In a satirical article entitled “A Nation of Nuts,”
New York Observer
editor Jim Windolf tallied the number of Americans allegedly suffering from some kind of mental disorder. He sent away for brochures and literature of dozens of advocacy agencies and mental health organizations. Then he did the math. “If you believe the statistics,” Windolf reported, “77 percent of America's adult population is a mess. . . . And we haven't even thrown in alien abductees, road ragers, and internet addicts.”
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If you factor in Gilligan's
and Pipher's hapless girls, Pollack's suffering and dangerous boys, and Faludi's agonized men, the figure must be very close to 100 percent.

Gilligan, Pipher, Pollack, and Faludi all find abnormality and inner anguish in an outwardly normal and happy population. Each traces the malaise to the “male culture,” which forces harmful gender stereotypes, myths, or “masks” on the population in crisis—women, girls, boys, and men. Girls and women are constrained to be “nice and kind”; boys and men are constrained to be “in control” and emotionally disconnected. Each writer projects an air of sympathy, and of earnest desire to rescue the anguished casualties of our patriarchal culture. But the Gilligan-Pipher-Pollack-Faludi construct creates a serious problem. By taking a small, unhappy minority as representative of an entire group, the writers present the groups themselves as pitiable, incompetent, and unworthy of respect. Pollack, for example, wants to rescue boys from “the myths of boyhood,” but unwittingly harms them by arousing public fear, dismay, and suspicion. In characterizing boys as “Hamlets,” he stigmatizes an entire sex and age group. His seemingly benign project of reconnecting boys to their inner nurturers pressures boys to be more like girls. The effect is to put boys on the defensive—not an incidental effect, as we shall see.

I have inveighed against the large, extreme, and irresponsible claims of the crisis writers, pointing out that no credible evidence backs them up. What about their more moderate and seemingly reasonable assertions? Gilligan and Pollack speak of boys as hiding their humanity and submerging their sensitivity. They suggest that apparently healthy boys are emotionally repressed and out of touch with their feelings. Is that true?

When my son David was thirteen, he sometimes showed the kind of emotional disengagement that worries the boy reformers. He came to me one evening when he was in the seventh grade, utterly confused by his homework assignment. Like many contemporary English and social studies textbooks, his book,
Write Source 2000
, was chock-full of exercises designed
to improve children's self-esteem and draw them out emotionally.
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“Mom, what do they want?” David asked. He had read a short story in which one character always compared himself to another. Here are the questions David had to answer:

• Do you often compare yourself with someone?

• Do you compare to make yourself feel better?

• Does your comparison ever make you feel inferior?

Another set of questions asked about profanity in the story:

• How do you feel about [the main character's] choice of words?

• Do you curse? Why? When? Why not?

• Does cursing make you feel more powerful? Are you feeling a bit uneasy about discussing cursing? Why? Why not?

The
Write Source 2000 Teacher's Guide
suggests grading students on a scale from 1 to 10: 10 for a student who is “intensely engaged,” down to a 1 for a student who “does not engage at all.” My son did not engage at all. Here is how he answered:

Do you often compare yourself with someone?

“Sometimes.”

Do you compare to make yourself feel better?

“No. I do not.”

Does your comparison ever make you feel inferior?

“No.”

I was amused by his terse replies. But in the spirit of Gilligan and Pollack, the authors of
Write Source 2000
might see them as signs of emotional shutdown. Toy manufacturers know about boys' reluctance to engage in social
interactions. They have never been able to interest boys in the kinds of interactive social games that girls love. In the computer game Talk with Me Barbie, Barbie develops a personal relationship with the player: she learns her name and chats with her about dating, careers, and playing house. These Barbie games are among the all-time bestselling interactive games. But boys don't buy them.

Males, whether young or old, are on the whole, less interested than females in talking about feelings and personal relationships. In one experiment, researchers at Northeastern University analyzed college students' conversations at the cafeteria table. They found that young women were far more likely to discuss intimates: close friends, boyfriends, family members. “Specifically,” say the authors, “56 percent of the women's targets but only 25 percent of the men's targets were friends and relatives.”
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This is just one study, but it is backed up by massive evidence of distinct male and female interests and preferences.

In another study, boys and girls differed in how they perceived objects and people.
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Researchers simultaneously presented male and female college students with two images on a stereoscope: one of an object, the other of a person. Asked to say what they saw, the male subjects saw the object more often than they saw the person; the female subjects saw the person more often than they saw the object. In addition, dozens of experiments confirm that women are much better than men at judging emotions based on the expression on a stranger's face.
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These differences have motivated the gender specialists at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the Wellesley Center, the Boys' Project at Tufts, and McLean Hospital's Center for Men to recommend that we all try to “reconnect” boys. But there is no evidence that boys need what they are offering. Would boys be improved if they were taught to be comfortable playing with Talk with Me Barbie? Are their preferences and attitudes signs of insensitivity and repression, or just innocent and healthy expressions of their inner nature?

If, as the evidence strongly suggests, the characteristic preferences and behaviors of males and females are expressions of innate differences, the differences
in emotional styles will be difficult or impossible to eliminate. In any case, why should anyone make it their business to eliminate them?

The gender experts will reply that boys' relative taciturnity puts them and others in harm's way; in support they adduce their own research. But that research is flawed. There is no good reason to believe that boys as a group are emotionally endangered; nor is there reason to think that the typical male reticence is some kind of disorder in need of treatment. In fact, the boy reformers such as Pollack, Gilligan, and their followers need to consider the possibility that male stoicism and reserve may well be traits to be encouraged, not vices or psychological weaknesses to be overcome.

The argument in favor of saving boys by reconnecting them emotionally rests on the popular assumption that repressing emotions is harmful, while giving discursive vent to them is, on the whole, healthy. Psychologists have recently begun to examine the supposition that speaking out and declaring one's feelings is better than holding them in. Jane Bybee, a psychologist at Suffolk University in Boston, studied a group of high school students, classifying them as “repressors” (those not focused on their inner states), “sensitizers” (those keenly aware of their moods and feelings), or “intermediates.” She then had the students evaluate themselves and others using these distinctions. She also had the teachers evaluate the students. She found that the “repressors” were less anxious, more confident, and more successful academically and socially. Bybee's conclusion is tentative: “In our day-to-day behavior it may be good not to be so emotional and needy. The moods of repressed people may be more balanced.”
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