The War Against Boys By Christina Hoff Sommers

2. The War Against Boys is the story of our cultural attack on the modern male. Twenty-first century men are looked down-upon, laughed at, and many times emasculated in our day-to-day lives. In her book, Christina Hoff Sommers does an excellent job reminding us that men are responsible for a lot of good in the world: “This book tells the story of how it has become fashionable to attribute pathology to millions of healthy male children. It is a story of how we are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the word.” Our culture has promoted a skewed view; most people believe that women are treated unfairly, that

men need to be changed and “recreated,” to connect with their feminine side: “American boys face genuine problems that cannot be addressed by constructing new versions of manhood. They do not need to be “rescued” from their masculinity. On the other hand, too many of our sons are languishing academically and socially. The widening education gap threatens the future of millions of American boys.” In closing, Sommers gives her reader a wonderful overview of the book, and a heartfelt plea for change before it’s too late: “In the war against boys, as in all wars, the first casualty is truth. In the United States, the truth about boys has been distorted and buried. I begin by showing how the plight of boys came to be buried and by whom. I then report on actual condition of boys, giving readers documented accounts of how boys are faring and suggestion what we can do to brighten their prospects. boys badly need our attention. It is late, but not too late.”
3. Christina Hoff Sommers outlines the constant gender battle and how it affects both sexes in her recent book, The War Against Boys. Sommers, a mother of 2 boys, is a moderate feminist. The book provides a plethora of examples in which boys are now and have been for a few decades forgotten. Sommers suggests that our society has been so focused on the success and advancement of young girls and women that we have forgotten about our young boys and men. The War Against Boys brings this gender situation to the surface and deals with it accordingly. “It’s a bad time to be a boy in America,” the author declares. She spends much of her time in this contentious study establishing and documenting her thesis that, contrary to the declarations of Harvard educator Carol Gilligan and her myriad followers, it is boys, not girls, who “are languishing academically and socially.” Sommers produces convincing, even devastating evidence of the academic dishonesty practiced by those who support the opposite thesis—the so-called “girl-crisis” writers. Sommers recognizes that the disturbing results of these flawed studies attract journalists, many of whom “prefer disseminating sensational claims to looking for dissenting voices”; she knows, too, that “apocalyptic alarms about looming mental health disasters . . . sell well.” Sommers argues that what alarmists have characterized as “crises” are often simply the evanescent traits typical of adolescents—of both sexes. Sommers is much less convincing, however, when she offers her remedy—a simplistic package of back-to-the-basics instruction and “moral education” to overcome the “socially crude, disrespectful, and untoward behavior” in the public schools whose “permissive” teachers and administrators she blames for crimes ranging from “intruding into . . . children’s psychic lives” to the shootings at Columbine.