The War Against Boys Quotes

“This book explains how it became fashionable to pathologize the behavior of millions of healthy male children. We have turned against boys and forgotten a simple truth: the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal males are responsible for much of what is right in the world. No one denies that boys’ aggressive tendencies must be mitigated and channeled toward constructive ends. Boys need (and crave) discipline, respect, and moral guidance. Boys need love and tolerant understanding. But being a boy is not a social disease.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Children need to be moral more than they need to be in touch with their feelings. They need to be well educated more than they need classroom self-esteem exercises and support groups. Nor are they improved by having their femininity or masculinity “reinvented.” Emotional fixes are not the answer. Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Common sense, convention, tradition, and modern social science research converge in support of the Aristotelian tradition of directive character education.45 Children need clear standards, firm expectations, and adults in their lives who are loving and understanding but who insist on responsible behavior. But all of this was out of fashion in education circles for more than thirty years. By the mid-1970s, we were on our way to becoming the first society in history to use high principle to weaken the moral authority of teachers.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“When my son David was a high school senior in 2003, his graduating class went on a camping trip in the desert. A creative writing educator visited the camp and led the group through an exercise designed to develop their sensitivity and imaginations. Each student was given a pen, a notebook, a candle, and matches. They were told to walk a short distance into the desert, sit down alone, and “discover themselves.” The girls followed instructions. The boys, baffled by the assignment, gathered together, threw the notebooks into a pile, lit them with the matches, and made a little bonfire.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“If asked to make a drawing, little girls almost always create scenes with at least one person, while males nearly always draw things—cars, rockets, or trucks.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men

“It has never been shown that “high self-esteem” is a good trait for students to possess. Meanwhile, researchers have uncovered a worrisome correlation between inflated self-esteem and juvenile delinquency. As Brad Bushman, an Iowa State University psychologist, explains, “If kids develop unrealistic opinions of themselves and those views are rejected by others, the kids are potentially dangerous.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“The Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans, founded in 1947 and devoted to promoting and affirming individual initiative and “the American dream,” releases annual back-to-school surveys.48 Its survey for 1998 contrasted two groups of students: the “highly successful” (approximately 18 percent of American students) and the “disillusioned” (approximately 15 percent). The successful students work hard, choose challenging classes, make schoolwork a top priority, get good grades, participate in extracurricular activities, and feel that teachers and administrators care about them and listen to them. According to the association, the successful group in the 1998 survey is 63 percent female and 37 percent male. The disillusioned students are pessimistic about their future, get low grades, and have little contact with teachers. The disillusioned group could accurately be characterized as demoralized. According to the Alger Association, “Nearly seven out of ten are male.”49”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“But being a boy is not a social disease.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“The vast majority of American boys and girls are psychologically healthy. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that they are morally and academically undernourished.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“American boys have a lot in common with their counterparts in England and Australia. In all three countries, boys are on the wrong side of an education gender gap. But there is one major difference: it is inconceivable that reports on the US boy gap would emanate from the US Congress. A Success for Boys campaign would create havoc in the United States. The women’s lobby would rise in fury. The ACLU would find someone to sue. Legislators would face an avalanche of angry faxes, emails, petitions, and phone calls for taking part in a “backlash” against girls.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Her later work on adolescent girls and their “silenced” voices shows us a different Gilligan. Her ideas were successful in the sense that they inspired activists in organizations like the AAUW and the Ms. Foundation to go on red alert in an effort to save the nation’s “drowning and disappearing” daughters. But all their activism was based on a false premise: that girls were subdued, neglected, and diminished. In fact, the opposite was true: girls were moving ahead of boys in most of the ways that count. Gilligan’s powerful myth of the incredible shrinking girl did more harm than good. It patronized girls, portraying them as victims of the culture. It diverted attention from the academic deficits of boys. It also gave urgency and credibility to a specious self-esteem movement that wasted everybody’s time.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Gilligan’s assertion that the “pressure of cultural norms” causes boys to separate from their mothers and thereby generates physical disorders has not been tested empirically. Nor does Gilligan suggest how it might be tested or even allow that empirical support might be called for. We are asked, in effect, to take it on her say-so that boys need to be protected from our warmongering, patriarchal, capitalistic culture that desensitizes them, submerges their humanity, undermines their mental health, and turns many into violent predators. But are boys aggressive and violent because they are psychically separated from their mothers? Thirty years of research suggest that it is the absence of the male parent that is more often the problem. The boys who are most at risk for juvenile delinquency and violence are boys who are literally separated from their fathers.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“In May 2002, the principal of Franklin Elementary School in Santa Monica, California, sent a newsletter to parents informing them that children could no longer play tag during the lunch recess. As she explained, “The running part of this activity is healthy and encouraged; however, in this game there is a ‘victim’ or ‘it,’ which creates a self-esteem issue.”4 School districts in Texas, Maryland, New York, and Virginia “have banned, limited, or discouraged” dodgeball.5 “Any time you throw an object at somebody,” said an elementary school coach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “it creates an environment of retaliation and resentment.”6 Coaches who permit children to play dodgeball “should be fired immediately,” according to the physical education chairman at Central High School in Naperville, Illinois.7”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“The creative writing teacher was horrified at the thought that she was teaching a pack of insipient arsonists—or Lord of the Flies sociopaths. In fact, they were just boys. But, increasingly, in our schools and in our homes, everyday boyishness is seen as aberrational, toxic—a pathology in need of a cure. Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“The current plight of boys and young men is, in fact, a women’s issue. Those boys are our sons; they are the people with whom our daughters will build a future. If our boys are in trouble, so are we all. In the war against boys, as in all wars, the first casualty is truth.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men

“Teachers as early as kindergarten factor good behavior into grades—and girls, as a rule, comport themselves far better and are more amenable to classroom routines than boys.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Capturing media attention and being credible are distinct phenomena.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“The Haight-Ashbury hippies had collectively decided that hygiene was a middle-class hang-up. So they determined to live without it. For example, baths and showers, while not actually banned, were frowned upon as retrograde. Wolfe was intrigued by these hippies who, he said, “sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero.”4 After a while their principled aversion to modern hygiene had consequences that were as unpleasant as they were unforeseen. Wolfe describes them thus: “At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.”5 The itching and the manginess eventually began to vex the hippies, leading them individually to seek help from the local free clinics. Step by step, they had to rediscover for themselves the rudiments of modern hygiene. That rueful process of rediscovery is Wolfe’s Great Relearning. A Great Relearning is what has to happen whenever reformers go too far—whenever, in order to start over “from zero,” they jettison basic values, well-proven social practices, and plain common sense.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies are Harming Our Young Men

“Feminist Gloria Steinem has called research on sex differences “anti-American.” She says, “It is what is keeping us down.” According to Gloria Allred, such research simply should not be done. “This is harmful and dangerous to our daughters’ lives, to our mothers’ lives, and I am very angry about it.” Feminist critics have a term for neurologists who study sex differences: “neurosexists.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men

“Most little girls don’t want to play with trucks, as almost any parent can attest. Including me: when my son gave his daughter Eliza a toy train, she placed it in a baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some sleep.”
― Christina Hoff Sommers, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men