It's a bad time to be a boy in America. As the century drew to a close, the defining event for American girls was the triumph of the U.S. soccer team. For boys, the symbolic event was the mass killing at Columbine High School.
It would seem that boys in our society are greatly at risk. Yet the best-known studies and the academic experts say that it's girls who are suffering from a decline in self-esteem. It's girls, they say, who need extra help in school and elsewhere in a society that favors boys. The problem with boys is that they are boys, say the experts. We need to change their natures. We need to get them to be more like . . . girls.
In her new book from Simon and Schuster, The War against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers addresses the "girl crisis" that has been seized upon by feminists and promoted by leading academic experts. Sommers examines the work of some of the "experts" and finds that it is girls who are outperforming boys academically. Boys lag behind girls in reading and writing ability, and they are less likely to go to college. Under the guise of helping girls, many schools have adopted policies that penalize boys, often for simply being masculine. Sommers says that boys need help, but not the sort they've been getting. They need help catching up with girls academically; they do not need to be rescued from masculinity. In this forum she will discuss the war on boys: who is waging it and why, and how it’s affecting boys.
