Fenger Pointing
Becky Fenger | August 12, 2009
Are boys really rotten?
Acclaimed author George Gilder joined three accomplished women last month for a discussion of society's roles for the sexes. By the end of the evening, the audience was quite sympathetic to the confusion males are experiencing in this country.
One of the participants was Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor who taught ethics and is best known for her critique of late twentieth-century feminism. She has been viciously attacked by these same feminists for her endeavors. Amusingly, Sommers has been called a female impersonator! The oh-so-loveable Betty Friedan once denounced Dr. Sommers as a "lightweight and a birdbrain."
Nowhere is the change in roles more evident than in education. Despite the popular notion that girls are overlooked in elementary and secondary school, boys are now the second sex in American education. They are heading to "re-education camps," while women are currently earning the majority of college degrees.
We've all shaken our heads when teachers changed the games at playtime. Tug of War had to be Tug of Peace. Tag was replaced by "Circle of Friends" where no one is ever "out." The worst had to be changing the color of ink in teachers' correcting pens from the "scary" red to a more non-threatening purple. (What, not lavender?)
We now have gender apartheid, with noted pit bull attorney Gloria Allred suing the Boy Scouts for excluding girls, among her other soapbox cases. Allred said that boys must be socialized as a result of a study that showed little girls placing toy furniture in a dollhouse, while little boys were throwing the baby carriages off the roof of the house. Horrors! Feminists have determined that boys must be civilized to be acceptable in society.
Kate O'Beirne, head of the National Review Institute, spoke of the damage done to sports teams for boys when Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972 passed. The legislation banned sex discrimination in schools, whether in athletics or academics. It had the untoward result of decimating boys' sports when no girls wanted to play a particular sport. No matching team of girls for wrestling? No wrestling team allowed for boys. Simple – and stupid.
Not content to rob boys of certain sports, the do-gooders are going to use Title IX for education parity in engineering, physics and computer science. That should be enough to cripple those very necessary fields in this day and age.
George Gilder maintains that the institution of marriage has to be sustained if one wants a civilized society. Women can't raise boys alone, despite the valiant effort of single mothers. When women can have access to men's incomes without marrying them, we get a huge increase in fatherless families. At any given time, a third of these missing fathers are in jail or on the lamb. Thus, we have a police state for boys and a welfare state for girls.
Psychiatrist and author/lecturer Sally Satel bemoaned the medicalization of otherwise normal behavior. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) affects only 2 percent to 5 percent of boys, yet fifteen percent of boys are being treated for behavior that is normal to healthy little boys.
President Barack Obama set up the White House Office of Women and Girls. (I thought that was Bill Clinton's special area.) I see this as a waste of money, if anyone still counts that stuff. First of all, it perpetuates myths like this one: Women aren't being tested for heart disease. They are.
Duke University law professor Madeline Morris worked at the Pentagon and wanted to eliminate the male characteristics of dominance, willingness to take risks, and aggression from our fighting men. She must want the U.S. Army to flatter the enemy to death.
The authors all agreed that it is a career killer to be anything but wildly in favor of integration of the military. There are quotas for recruiting women, and concessions for lack of strength.
"It's up to us women to take on the feminists, not the men," Kate O' Beirne informs us. Come on, gals. I'm ticked that a man can no longer open a door for us without being afraid of being scolded: "I can do it myself!" No one from the League of Women Voters and the American Association of University Women – liberal barracuda groups both – saw the irony of announcing, "We need men to take down the tables" after a debate they sponsored. I thought a few karate chops by their officers should have handled it.