Review excerpt:
The overt gist of Sommers' book, written in stolid, mass-production-style prose, is that we've begun to think of boyhood as a pathological state. What society once considered a normal part of being a boy--aggression, energy, noise, restlessness; rampant, crude curiosity--now looks like sick behavior. The current archetypes for boys, the figures that popular culture takes to epitomize being young and male, are the thugs from the Spur Posse in California and the killers at Columbine High. The result is that boys are coming to hate themselves simply for being who they are.
Mark Edmundson, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author, most recently, of Nightmare on Main Street. Christina Hoff Sommers is a resident scholar at AEI.
