Feminists

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Examined carefully, Sommers's case does not hold up well. She persistently misrepresents scholarly debate, ignores evidence that contradicts her assertions, and directs intense scrutiny at studies she opposes while giving a free critical ride to research she supports. A few examples of her style of argument will have to stand for a much larger pattern.

Let's look first at education. Sommers says that feminists have ignored the educational problems of boys, starting with How Schools Shortchange Girls. This argument runs into the inconvenient fact that the first and best-known study documenting patterns of male underachievement in school was sponsored by none other than the AAUW, in a follow-up to their study of girls' performance. It's an inconvenient fact that a women's organization led the way in studying the problems of boys, so Sommers attacks the AAUW for underpublicizing the study (she cites no data to support this charge). As for Sommers's claim that "girls and young women are thriving" academically, there have been many studies since Shortchange that contradict her, but she does not examine them. She describes studies that support her position but does not subject them to the same critical scrutiny to which she subjects Shortchange. Indeed, the AAUW follow-up study that included boys (and which Sommers strongly approves) reached the following conclusion, as quoted by Sommers: "Inequity can (and does) work in both directions." Sommers's own Table 2 shows that girls lag behind boys in percentages taking calculus, physics, AP/honors chemistry, engineering and astronomy at the high school level. Sommers applies a zero-sum model to gender concerns in education. It doesn't seem to occur to her that each sex faces significant problems that need redress.

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In the end, Sommers fails to prove either claim in the title of her book. She does not show that there is a "war against boys." All she can show is that feminists are attacking her "boys-will-be-boys" concept of boyhood, just as she attacks their more flexible notion. The difference between attacking a concept and attacking millions of real children is both enormous and patently obvious. Sommers's title, then, is not just wrong but inexcusably misleading. For the claim in her subtitle that "misguided feminism is harming our young men," she does not present a shred of credible supporting evidence but rather advances her position by assertion and abstract argumentation.

Had Sommers written a calm, factual presentation of boys' academic and social problems, this could have been a valuable book. Boys do lag behind girls in reading and writing, and they do trail in extracurricular participation. They are both perpetrators and victims of violence more often than girls are. But Sommers's book is a work of neither dispassionate social science nor reflective scholarship; it is a conservative polemic. Sommers focuses less on boys than on the feminists and cultural liberals against whom she has a long-standing animus. As a society, we sorely need a discussion of boyhood that is thoughtful and searching. This intemperate book is a hindrance to such conversation.