The War on Boys

Now that the holidays have (thankfully) passed, the Jewish/Muslim/Buddhist/Atheist/Democrat “War on Christmas” is but a memory. The holy armies of commercialism have won once again. All praise Visa.

Until we get closer to the 2006 election, the gay “Assault on Marriage” will remain on the back burner. Nothing gets elderly conservatives to the election booths like a fictitious attack on the bastion that is traditional marriage, but let’s not get them riled up too soon or their collective apoplexy may decimate the GOP voting rolls. Can’t let those minions of Satan (sorry, liberals) infringe upon the rights of Brittney Spears to have as many quickie Vegas weddings as she wants.

So then, what’s a good conservative to do? For social critics like John Tierney and Kate O’Bierne, the way to keep their acolytes happy is to complain about the “War on Boys” – the observation that the traditionally male-dominated fortress of higher education is becoming increasingly dominated by the fairer sex. Perhaps David Horowitz can add gender parity to his “Academic Bill of Rights”.

I’m so glad that they brought this onslaught on us Y-chromosomes to my attention, otherwise my victimhood might have failed to register in my pitiful little testosterone-addled brain. After all, I’ve been too caught up reading horrific stories about gender inequality in other areas of the world, such as the recent Lancet study that (conservatively) estimates that 500,000 female fetuses are aborted every year in India because boys are “more economically beneficial” to the family. This selective termination of fetuses on the basis of sex isn’t limited solely to India, or even so-called non-Western cultures. Nor will stricter enforcement of existing pre-natal screening restrictions by Indian and other authories resolve this problem. Just consider the fact that 95% of all children in Chinese orphanages are girls, a result of China’s one-child policy coupled with a cultural preference for male heirs. Heck, we don’t even have a good idea of how severe the problem of gender equality is. Hopefully some future, brainy, and most likely female academic will have the intelligence and wherewithal to address these problems.

And to all those individuals worrying about the “War on Boys”, let me give you a sage piece of advice that the coach of my boyhood soccer team once gave – suck it up and deal. Of course, my coach was a woman …
- Sean Philpott

posted Jan 22, 2006 | link | jump to the comments (8)

comments

Are you kidding me? Kate O'Beirne has editorialized, as a member of National Review board of editors and on her own, against the various Chinese and Indian policies you mention maybe 100's of times. She probably had China's one child policy as an outrage of the week back when she was on Capital Gang, AND she once served on an American delegation to a UN woman's conference where she spoke out against sex-selective abortion as a particularly bad example of why all abortion is wrong (at least in her opinion).
You are going to tell, a National Review Washington Editor, that she isn't anti-Communist China or anti-Chinese abortion ENOUGH? Are you crazy?

- by Bradford Short on Jan 23, 2006 at 12:55 AM | link

I don't particularly think there are any 'war on boys' or similar going on. I guess some very out there feminists may be proposing such a thing, although I wouldn't be familiar with them.
Incidentally, on your last comment most of the teachers in high schools are now women IIRC. In fact, teaching (below tertiary anyway) is becoming rather hostile to having male teachers.
This doesn't mean there is any war on boys or such nonsense though.

- by Joseph O'Donnell on Jan 23, 2006 at 11:25 AM | link

I just read the editorials for the current issue of National Review this morning. NR's editorials are called "The Week"-and a rare one is signed by NR's original web-guy, Jonah Goldberg. I do not think this means that Goldberg doesn't speak for the editors, and, irrespective, he usually speaks for them in the sense that they agree.
The current issue's The Week, on page 8 includes a Goldberg editorial entitled "10 Million Missing Girls"-that calls the Indian mysogenistic practice of abortion and Communist China's one-child policy all the names they deserve. Jonah Goldberg is a contributing editor to National Review and is based at the Washington office of NR. The lady there who pulls rank on him is Kate O'Beirne. This appeared in the, current, Jan. 30 issue of NR, which was printed on Jan. 12, or basically about a week-and-a-half before this silly post was published.
So basically not only do O'Beirne and her colleagues know about the "horrific stories" you are talking about, they were publishing on them long before you. You might actually want to read some of O'Beirne's magazine before you embarass yourself trying to slam her.

- by Bradford Short on Jan 23, 2006 at 5:56 PM | link

Christina Hoff Summers actually wrote a very interesting piece in the Atlantic a few years ago about the social construction of gender gaps in education and childhood development. I believe it was a prelude to a book. At any rate, it was a very enlightening introduction to the interface between gender politics and social research.

- by Josh Braun on Jan 23, 2006 at 11:37 PM | link

I'd like to thank all of the respondents for their comments. I am surprised, however, that some readers have construed my post as a personal attack on Kate O'Beirne and have responded in kind. Was I personally targeting her? No. I could have easily
posted the names of such other social critics as Christina Hoff Sommers, Maggie Gallagher, David Brooks, George Gilder, Michael Gurian or a score of others, many of whom have also written about issues of abortion in places like India and China. However, Kate O'Beirne has recently published a new book (which I have read), another salvo in the "War on Feminism", that she is actively promoting by using, among other things, the feminization of education.
In focusing on questions about whether or not I have a personal vendetta against Kate O'Beirne, the point of my original post was missed. Newsweek magazine, for example, hits the newsstands this morning with a cover story that simply repeats this mantra, worrying that the American educational system has become so feminized that boys can not longer succeed, or even function. But why isn't the success of women in American education being seen as a long-overdue victory in the "War Against Girls", or even as a possible model of educational success? As Shakespeare's Sister so aptly puts it, "the notion that the nebulous concept of 'feminization' is responsible for some boys struggling is being treated as conventional wisdom, while any other explanations are relegated to side notes, if theyre even addressed at all. The suggestion that girls successes be used as a model is routinely absent" (http://shakespearessister.blogspot.com/2006/01/trouble-with-boys.html)
why, given the millenia of economic, physical and political subjugation of women, is gender politics suddenly being framed as the victimization of men?

- by Sean on Jan 24, 2006 at 5:48 AM | link

What I dislike about your post is that you seem to be saying that the performance of boys compared to girls is no cause for concern and not a subject worthy of investigation.
If you'd said instead: "While the disparity is troubling, there is no reason to believe that liberal-minded reforms are to blame," then I could at least understand you -- though I'd mildly disagree. But what you seem to be saying right now is really beyond my comprehension.
Also, it really was a mistake, in this particular context, to bring up parental gender preferences and their effect on adoption, abortion, and so on. In the US, both liberal and conservative social critics are concerned about that issue, but the consevatives are at least an order of magnitude more vocal about it.

- by James Nightshade on Jan 24, 2006 at 9:47 AM | link

"After all, Ive been too caught up reading horrific stories about gender inequality in other areas of the world, such as the recent Lancet study that (conservatively) estimates that 500,000 female fetuses are aborted every year in India because boys are 'more economically beneficial' to the family."
The obvious implication of this statement is that those who worry about the "war on boys" are NOT "too caught up reading" such "horrific stories." I trust that I have shown that that is self-evidently false, and that, if anything, the conservative press that does promote books like Sommers, O'Beirne, etc. has been sounding the alarm on this literally for more than a decade.
I do not keep tabs on literally everyone else who is a conservative in America, but I have strong doubts as to whether "Maggie Gallagher" or "George Gilder" have been loathe to attack the mysogenistic tendencies of the less life-affirming strains of Hinduism or Chinese Communist mass-homicide. This post means nothing if there isn't a tendency on the part of conservatives to overlook girl-killing abortion, and most certainly no such tendency exists.
Conservatives identify the disease to be different from what the Left does. China and India were not models of sex equality before cleap, efficient abortion came to their shores (and Mao took over one of their countries), but they did not, or at least had not for centuries killed tens of millions as such female fetuses have died in India recently. Conservatives therefore conclude that the world-wide abortion culture has made the problem of mysogeny in China and India much, much worse. Conservatives are saying that late 20th century feminists are partly to blame for this, even if the ground was already fertile for such female-killing before Gloria Steinem was born. Kate O'Beirne literally *is* one of the people who has publically concluded this and critisized feminists for it.
Also, from personal experience here at the UN, I know that radical feminist groups are very, very chummy with delegates from India and China, who they can trust at places like the Cairo and Bejing conferences, to go out of their way to demean pro-life delegates from the Holy See or Costa Rica for opposing adding "reproductive rights" language to proposed international law documents. We at C-FAM, or at our British and Canadian equivalents (SPUC, CARE, the Campaign for Life Coalition) are often attacked for being too chummy with Islamic nations that have horrid human rights records but "vote our way" on issues like abortion and "reproductive rights." I believe that this is, on the whole, false and unfair. My co-workers' job is to lobby, and while that usually involves talking to Latin American and Eastern European and African delegates, it also involves talking to the delegate from Sudan. Some people I have met I think like, say, a certain person from Iran or Sudan way too much, but no one above me orders me to stop supporting taking, say, Sudan off the Human Rights Commission of the UN because "we need them on there to vote our way." Groups like the Center for Reproductive Rights, I think, are far more mum on criticizim of the People's Republic of China, which wants "reproductive rights" in UN documents, wants abortion called such a right and then wants the UN-with USA money in part-to aid them in it and not be able to say "we still don't believe abortion is a reproductive right."
Most importantly, I think many, many conservatives have personally attacked this unholy alliance between Western Feminists and Chinese Communists who force abortions on women to get rid of future women. O'Beirne's book is literally part of such conservative critique.
All you are doing is comlpetely ignoring that theory of past events and saying that because conservatives talk about the "war on boys", and they don't tend to like Western feminists, and feminists must always be *truly* pro-woman, conservatives must be not caring about the suffering of women in foreign lands. That is absurd. The above is the reason why it is absurd. Women in foreign lands are being forced into abortions that international pro-abortion rights groups are complicit in via thier voting and lobbying arangements here, in Geneva, and in Cairo and Bejing when the circus comes to town (and they are also complicit in paying for a lot of these abortions, I know that the Gates Foundation is paying for a ton of "planed parenthood" in India that is blatantly mysogenistic and no Western Philanthropy has any business supporting). To call conservatives not sufficiently worried about such female fetus-killing after all their outcry on it, in defending these feminists and Leftists (like Bill Gates) who actually are in an unholy alliance with it-that is defending them from O'Beirne's book is the height of chutzpah.