Save the Males (In School)

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

This flawed research, says Sommers, was touted by gullible news media that accepted it at face value. And it resonated with women's groups who used it to further their political agenda. Gilligan has defended her research in an ongoing online joust with Sommers, and is backed up by family therapists like Marianne Walters of the Family Practice Center in Washington, D.C., who tells Family Therapy Networker (July/Aug. 2000), 'Gilligan never said girls go into a funk. She said only that they lost their voice during those preadolescent and adolescent years because of competition for the attention of boys. . . . It's so clear. Why would anyone want to distort it the way this woman is distorting it?'

As Howard Muson writes in Family Therapy Networker, 'Sommers has made a vocation out of bird-dogging weaknesses in research invoked to redress the wrongs done to girls.'

Muson agrees that 'girls are clearly on top' academically. Yet this hardly proves there's a war against boys in school, or even that boys are in trouble socially. As Evan Imber-Black of the Center for Families and Health at the Ackerman Institute in New York puts it, 'A lot of our children are in trouble.'

Ironically, Gilligan has since switched her focus to boys. But while Sommers blames boys' aggression on absent fathers, Gilligan says they need to be more in tune with their feminine side.

Olga Silverstein, author of The Courage to Raise Good Men, has another view. She told Muson, 'We're all created by our culture, and if you look at different cultures, you'll see that men behave differently according to what the culture expects of them.'

But the view that the culture is to blame, rather than 'man-hating feminists,' misses the point, too, says Muson, who suggests moving beyond blame. If Sommers calls attention to the serious problems that boys face, she also reminds us that schools are not appropriate turf for gender warfare. As Imber-Black points out, 'We need girls and we need boys. We need to be paying attention to everybody.'

Discuss at the Globe conference in Cafe Utne: www.utne.com/salon.aspx

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print