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 world.
Christina Hoff Sommers
Boy's natural play is rough and tumble play, it's the universal play of little boys. And it's very different from aggression. And we are a society that's failing to understand the distinction.
It's good to raise awareness that men and boys are struggling, at least many of them are. But why say men are finished? It's too harsh, too sweeping, and it happens to not be true.
You have to be literate in today's world. We're not going to get away with not teaching boys to read.
Girls are more academically powerful. They make the grades, they run the student activities, they are the valedictorians.
I don't think anyone will deny that girls are academically superior as a group.
Harvard produces leaders. People with Harvard degrees go on to become administrators in high-level positions in state educational departments and in public schools around the country.
I think it's ill-advised to attribute pathologies to healthy people. It doesn't help normal, healthy, thriving children to be viewed as pitiable and fragile.
In reality, American girls are among the most outspoken, ambitious, successful girls in the history of the human race.
Any child may go through periods during which they become less outspoken with their parents or teachers. But girls, like boys, live in many different worlds - they have their friends and their classroom and their parents - and within these different domains, they may have different levels of expressiveness.
I'm concerned that boys have become politically incorrect, that we are a society in the process of turning against its male children.
Toy companies aren't interested in ideology, they want to sell toys. If they would sell a toy that both boys and girls would buy, it doubles profits.
We must have moral education in the schools, anti-bullying programs, but this does not mean programs to feminize boys.
I think the rules will change and I think more and more young women are going to decide that having a family and taking care of a home is not a bad choice, but how do we subsidize it - not necessarily European-style socialism. It'll have to be a new more creative, dynamic and local solution.
I think the fallacy is to think that Women's Liberation meant that men and women would become interchangeable. That has not happened, and most men and women would not want it to happen.
