"Snips & Snails: A Book for Real Boys" by Christina Hoff Sommers

Article here.

I know some here have some issues with Sommers, but overall, she is the biggest ally towards the improvement of boys education. This is the same book Wendy McElroy has discussed and praised in the past. Excerpt:

"Parents and educators are wringing their hands over the poor academic performance of boys. Girls are better readers, earn higher grades and are far more likely to go to college. America does a much better job educating girls than boys. But now, out of nowhere, comes a book that may hold the secret to male learning.
...
They are mothers who happen to notice that their sons have fallen in love with this wonderful, wholesome, delightfully instructive anachronism of a book."

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Comments

"It features an astute essay on that most mysterious of subjects, girls, and how to respect them, make friends with them and not to offend them."

I have a problem with this book teaching boys to respect girls without teaching boys shun girls who treat them as inferiors, girls who display anti-male attitudes, and girls who do not respect boys. Stop teaching boys to respect girls and women if they cannot do the same on our behalf. They don't get respect simply because they have two X chromosomes. They must earn it!

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Well put. I always tell the females in my life, "You have to earn chivalry from me."

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Nobody gets chivalry from me. It's a hateful anachronism that forces men into female-defined gender roles and which automatically places the man in an inferior role in a relationship.

I tell the women who ask that what they have to earn from me is respect. I'm fresh out of paternalism and chivalry.

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You know, the description of this book, and its goal reminds me a whole lot of the original purpose of building up the Boy Scouts, and of the original Boy Scout handbook.

Boys needed men to guide them because they were getting lost. Lessons focused on nature, survival; core values; direct interaction with boys and men...

And of course it was a huge success, for a long time.

I couldn't believe when in Canada, scouts became coed, and Girl Guides didn't.

One of the last areas where boys could learn as boys. Gone. But girls could learn to be women still. That just says it all to me.

Anyway, what's old is new again. Maybe there's a grain of hope here.

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"Nobody gets chivalry from me."

RandomMan -- that is the MRA No. 1 Rule!

Girls, you can't have independence and liberation and equality AND still have men believing and behaving and serving by the outdated and dysfunctional Code of Chivalry!

Women are still not as liberated as I would like them to be.

When 50% of the soldiers killed in Iraq are female, then I will celebrate women's "liberation" and "equality."

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When 50% of the soldiers killed in Iraq are female, then I will celebrate women's "liberation" and "equality."

Actually, since we're all so busy making amends for historical wrongs, it would have to be 100% women for the next several centuries. Then we'd be "equal".

Of course, you'll never hear feminists demanding that any "historical wrong" that favors women be corrected.

Hate and supremacy movements are particularly adept at selective perception.

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RandomMan, your degree of logical ruthlessness makes me look like Peter Pan.

I need to expand my "selective perception."

Can you trace your DNA back to samurai?

What is the proper political term -- reparations?

Count all the men disposed of fighting wars dedicated to making women happy.

What a foolish scam.....

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And my (feminist) 9th period teacher was lamenting that there was only two girls in the class.
I'm in the front, as my surname begins with AC, so I was first in line when we had to get DBQ(ugh)information. My teacher told me to let the girls go ahead, because there were only two of them, so I shoule be respectful.
I responded, "I give as much respect as I expect from others. I don't give special treatment to anybody."
She then responded that it wasn't very Chivalrous.
I then told her, "Chivalry is dead, and for good reason."
She stopped bugging me after that
However, if at any point she had said "Ladies first," I would have responded with "When I see a lady, I'll let her go in front, until then..." I had had a bad day that day.

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