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Most definitely, the title is inflammatory. Nice of them to put it in heavy type on the cover with a full color photo of an innocent boy there. I wonder if he'll look back on that as a national accusation of his lack of brains?
The thing that irks me about the article is that it automatically assumes the differences between boys and girls are a bad thing. Quite honestly, I do not believe females are a stronger sex than males simply because they develop faster. By the time a male is 30, he has caught up to female development (according to another recent article about this subject posted to this site).
While there are still obvious brain differences, claiming that one sex is "more developed/evolved" and the other is "primitive" because of those differences bothers the hell out of me. Who is to say that the way female brains develop hasn't been their handicap all along? That's another thing that gets me. If women are so superior, why have men (allegedly) always been the ones "in charge?"
Sigh. I do respect that the authors attempted to minimize the attack on boys in this piece, and that they did recognize that boys are suffering as a result of the current state of education. However, seeing boys as "weaker," "simple-minded," or "stupid" because of these issues is just wrong, and can only lead to greater discrimination against men by women. Why? Partially because these images of men are--and have been for years--reinforced by the media (Hallmark, Al Bundy, Homer Simpson, etc.).
Such a dark time...
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Well anyone who is interested in this subject should definitely read Christina Hoff Somers' book "The War Against Boys". Chock-full of information and good sense.
Part of the problem of course, is progressive education and co-ed schooling, which by its very nature benefits girls more than boys. The problem isn't that boys are less intelligent or unable to learn, the problem is that they learn DIFFERENTLY. What benefits a girl in education doesn't usually benefit a boy. Single-sex classes are one very helpful solution, if those classes take other aspects of boys' natures into account.
Homeschooling is another wonderful option, the one I favor. Again the parent needs to be aware of how each child learns and respectful of their paces in learning. This is easier to do in a home situation because you don't have to worry about a whole classroom but only a couple individual children. My own son simply wasn't ready to read, for example, until he was older. Whereas if he had been in a public school he would have been labeled and failed, I had the option of simply focusing on his strengths and waiting until he was actually READY for each necessary skill. So you spend that time putting in other sorts of information, teaching a love of good stories and language, and when they're ready, you move on. He reads just fine now, and now we have to work on expressing things in writing.
I also believe he would have been labeled ADD but in a home situation I didn't have to worry about all that, or submit his developing brain to psychoactive drugs. Rather I allow frequent breaks for physical activity and tailor lessons to accomodate his needs. A boy who's run some laps is far better able to concentrate on his math lesson! We're drugging all these normal boys simply for being boys, it's tragic.
One old-fashioned male teacher was asked once what he did with hyperactives. He said "You mean those high-strung boys? I just send em out for a few laps, settles em right down." Sometimes the answers are so much more simple than we allow. Another very important thing for attention spans is avoiding television and video games. Essential because it has been noted that the darting eyes of an ADD child are in perfect timing with visual shifts that occur in television. It seems to affect boys much more strongly than girls.
I was rather sad to see the mothers in the article are worried about their sons when perhaps they needn't be. The mother who is worried about the two year old who doesn't talk a lot is worried about something that's perfectly normal. A different educational approach would likely eliminate the ADD her middle son allegedly suffers. And her oldest needs his dad or some male role models in real life, a mentor. The other mom who doesn't allow any toy weapons - why not? Boys thrive on rough-and-tumble play and cops and robber play-acting. Far from contributing to real violence it instead leads to a great camaraderie between peers. And what do schools do? A boy was arrested for pointing a chicken finger - a CHICKEN FINGER - at his classmates - a harmless and normal activity, even if it was at an inappropriate time. Another was arrested and interrogated for FIVE HOURS at a police station and later charged with "making terroristic threats" when he pointed a "gun" made out of PAPER at his classmates. He was merely continuing the playground activity they had been engaging in a little earlier - cops and robbers. It's getting to where it's criminal simply to be a boy.
BTW I must mention this - this constant probing of boys, trying to get them to "open up" is not necessarily healthy or helpful to them. Boys are very resistant to psychological probing and some stoicism is inordinately helpful to human beings in overcoming trauma. It's time that girls began to take a bit of a lesson from boys in that area rather than trying to make the boys into girls. My own daughter has taken that to heart and has developed incredible emotional strength by not constantly self-examining and feeling the need to perpetually express every fleeting thought or emotion. "Let it all hang out" is a failed 60s/70s theory that doesn't help real people. Anger is to be controlled, not vented, and there are some things that are better left unsaid. It destroyed many marriages, that philosophy. Let's leave it behind where it belongs.
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by Anonymous User on Tuesday July 24, @07:32PM EST (#3)
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Nightmist, I get what you're saying about him but I'm in the UK right now and I saw "100 greatest TV people" a while back, it's not the exact title but anyway....
People voted for who they thought were great TV people, and guess what? Homer Simpson was number one! funny thing is, they showed a clip of Homer in a fishing boat singing "No time for LOOOOOSERSSS, cause we are the champions!" heh that was damn funny, considering he came number one.
BTW did you know only 3 women made it into the top 100? and one of those was miss piggy? honest to god, it really did happen.
Adam H
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I really really hope Lucy was one of the three. I Love Lucy is timeless. Ed Norton and Ralph Kramden should be on there too!
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I'm not really "dissing" Homer. I think the Simpsons is damn funny. What I DON'T like is the way other media pick up on that and attribute Homer's goofiness (or Al Bundy's bad luck) to all males. Women's magazines have often used Homer Simpson as a stereotype for the "typical male buffoon." Believe me, though, I watch the show every chance I get. :)
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"The female brain is also "architecturally finer--a later arrival in evolution," says Gur. Men make use of an older limbic system "present in more primitive creatures," often known as the reptilian brain."
Can you believe that this sexist crap was published!
This article brings up some good points, i.e. that there is a crisis among young males. But what this article does not do is examine that the current elementary schooling philosophy has been manipulated by a successful radical feminist one-sided ideology geared at advancing girls for decades now.
For the past decades educational and societal culture has been geared to enable girls to excel, and has been telling boys that there is something intrinsically wrong with them without addressing the reasons why boys have been falling behind. Yet nothing has been done to correct this situation, or to address boys early developmental needs.
The article was definitely written from a sexist feminist perspective. It's underlying message is:
"women are superior" - Look at all of the evidence that supports our more evolved state of being.
What bullshit!
If an article was written about all the contributions that men have brought to society
(as in - almost everything) and made an argument that adult women are somehow inferior because they have not contributed, do you think that the article would be headline news with select empirical evidence to support it? No way.
The article brings up some valid points - that our school systems fail to address boy's needs, but it does it from a one sided feminist perspective.
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Study shows girls outperform boys on MCAS English section
By Associated Press, 07/25/01
BOSTON -- The state Department of Education reported that girls outperformed boys on the English section of the 2000 MCAS tests.
Education officials studied the gap between female and male scores and found that although boys scored slightly higher then girls in math, science, and history, girls scored substantially higher than boys on the 10th-grade English exam.
#### I found this right after reading the "boys weaker sex" article. Notice the headline - then read the text. It is obvious that boys are doing pretty well, but the headline would make one think that girls are superior.
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All this crying wolf by the feminists can have one of two effects: 1) boys can be discarded by society; 2) the real problem can get solved. It's up to US to make sure that the problem gets solved.
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Indeed, frank_h. I know you've said before that you perform activism on the education side of men's issues. Can you suggest any courses of action we others (especially those of us without children) may take to focus attention on the problems without also causing discriminatory harm against our youth?
I hope you're participating in the chat tonight. I can't (again) because I am attending a Toys For Tots benefit at a local jazz bar, but I'll be thinking about you all.
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by Anonymous User on Wednesday July 25, @12:58PM EST (#10)
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The "Are Boys The Weaker Sex" article was awful. They hinted at prenatal environment as a problem then quickly dropped it. The focus was then immediately placed on boys as a biological slow-poke. The prenatal environment(consisting of an estrogen bath and attacks from the female immune system) stunts and/or damages the development of the male brain. We only need to look at the effects of pollution to see this effect. Many pollutants mimic the effects of estrogen. This has been shown to seriously effect the health of men and boys as well as advance the onset of puberty in girls. Yet, they hardly mention a peep about prenatal environment. I guess it's easier to pin all of the blame on males again.
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I agree, this article was infuriating garbage. Pure feminism. "Reptilian brain." They really believe this.
As for the (pre)natal environment, I was not surprised to note that the article made no mention of the fact that the vast majority of boys in America are subjected - by their mothers - to an extremely brutal and traumatic torture session (surely the equal of most anything protested by Amnesty International) immediately after birth - a ritual mutilation ceremony aimed directly at maleness itself, which could hardly have been better designed to encourage the subject to shut down the entire feeling system and collapse into a life attitude of mostly dull endurance.
An earlier poster cited Christina Hoff Summers' The War Against Boys as an example of enlightened consciousness on the subject. While I am reluctant to discourage any ray of light, however dim, when I applied my usual test to this book - looking in the index under "circumcision" - I found nothing of consequence. (This was in the library, I don't have the book with me, so don't remember whether there was no entry at all, or an entry with no significant content.) As it is clear to me that infant male circumcision occupies a place in the "war against boys" roughly analogous to the Pearl Harbor attack's importance in America's experience of WWII (i.e. an overwhelming, pre-emptive, surgical first strike), it seems clear to me that Ms. Sommers (actually, I believe she's a Mrs., and not ashamed to say it; I give her credit for that), however positive her motivation, doesn't yet "get it."
All this is really a game women are playing with themselves. It's clear to me that if the women of a culture want strong, developed, respectable men, they will have the same. American women do not. It's that simple.
Andrew Main
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This article is essentially an amplification of Feminism 101:
"The first males were mutants, freaks produced by some damage to the genes caused perhaps by disease or a radiation bombardment from the sun. Maleness remains a recessive genetic trait like colour-blindedness and haemophilia, with which it is linked. The suspicion that maleness is abnormal and that the Y chromosome is an accidental mutation boding no good for the race is strongly supported by the recent discovery by geneticists that congenital killers and criminals are possessed of not one but two Y chromosomes, bearing a double dose, as it were, of genetically undesirable maleness. If the Y chromosome is a degeneration and a deformity of the female X chromosome, then the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female." - Elizabeth Gould Davies, Feminist Dictionary (1974)
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Ha ha ha! That's such a classic twisting of scientific fact to fit political agenda. Thanks for posting that, Andrew. I mentioned this in another post, but I will do so again because it is more related to this topic. A very good SCIENTIFIC explanation of the way a fetus becomes a male is available on the Web here: http://www.andrologysociety.com/handbook/ch12.cfm
Basically, it explains that a fetus in its first developmental stages is neither male nor female (contrary to the belief that we all start out "female"), but has the ducts to create either sex.
From that point, if the fetus is denied the effects of the Y chromosome (the creation of testes), then he is denied the testis secretions which create a male, and he becomes female.
The is science dating back to the 1940s and is well-grounded. Too bad feminists must substitute dogma for fact.
By the way, Andrew, I haven't looked for information on circumcision on the Andrology Society's Web site, but I'm willing to bet it's there if you'd like to check for it. I know it's a matter that deeply concerns you, and I'd love to get your perspective compared to one from the scientific community.
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