Attention Must Be Paid: Warren Farrell and the Boy Crisis

Article here. Excerpt:

'I do understand, sadly, why men — and their real problems — don’t get the attention they deserve by the academy, the media, and government (what Michael Gurian calls “The Big Three” in his 2017 book, Saving Our Sons). But what I still can’t fathom is why boys don’t either, except that they are men-to-be.

Warren Farrell, who has been concerned about men for well over 30 years, has recently turned his attention to boys, and the result is The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (which he has coauthored with John Gray). Actually, worry about boys is not new. In fact, a cover story in Newsweek magazine in early 2006 is titled “The Boy Crisis: At Every Level of Education, They’re Falling Behind: What to Do.”

So how is it that a problem recognized more than a decade ago — even longer, if you consider Christina Hoff Sommers’ 2000 book, The War Against Boys — has barely been touched by the “big three”? I believe, and have for years, that a major reason is that with women viewed as a major cause for progressives, the problems faced by boys (and men) have been more or less ignored. But not by Warren Farrell, a liberal Democrat, who has gone where the data and his conscience have taken him. Farrell was early into second wave feminism, and was on the governing board of the National Organization for Women in the early 1970s. When he did talk and write about men, it was in that context, and I first heard of him when I came upon his 1975 book, The Liberated Man, which was lauded by, among others, Gloria Steinem.'