Boys to men, continued

by Michelle Chihara

BRAWER: "There's no Judy Blume for boys."

BARNEY BRAWER, Tufts University

Barney Brawer likes to tell a story of a Boston-area high-school principal who once admitted a startling piece of information. His school was quietly practicing a new kind of affirmative action -- it was admitting more boys than the test scores warranted. It had to, to even out the gender balance.

As coordinator of the Program for Educational Change Agents at Tufts University, Brawer has done extensive work with MCAS data, and he sees a crisis building. While girls have made great strides toward catching up to boys in math scores, Brawer sees a new "language gap": boys are now 16 to 20 percentage points behind girls in reading and writing. Also, in a world where a college degree is increasingly important, fewer boys are getting into and going to college.

Brawer is an open admirer of feminist scholars, particularly Carol Gilligan, the Harvard psychologist whose 1981 book In a Different Voice broke new ground in the study of girls' and women's psychological and moral development. Brawer would like to see some of the same approaches that are used with girls applied to boys. "If you take Carol Gilligan's work, it opens up a whole important way of looking at boys that we wouldn't have without it," he says. "It's an interesting question to pose to boys. What is your inner voice? Do you build your identity in relationships? These are the kinds of questions we'd never be asking boys if the women's literature didn't exist."

Brawer, who has collaborated with Gilligan in the past, hopes to publish a book about the connections between boys' problems and the huge cultural shifts in our understanding of gender. (His proposed book, Reinventing Boyhood, is subtitled Connecting Boys' Development, Women's Psychology, the Lives of Men, and the World of School.) His theory about the language gap draws on the feminist understanding of the math gap: girls were told they were bad at math, and they performed poorly. If boys are being told not to communicate their feelings, could that be impairing their general ability to express themselves, and therefore their language skills? Brawer says that's entirely possible.

Unlike Thompson and Newberger, Brawer draws freely on certain "feminine" paradigms as good examples for masculine culture. "There's no Judy Blume for boys," says Brawer. "We men are where women were 30 years ago. Men are just starting to talk about their bodies." He even sees positive aspects to Bob Dole's television commercials for Viagra -- not because they're funny, but because they feature a man delivering a personal narrative.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that Barney Brawer is without a book contract (yet). He seems the least concerned about the charge that he's trying to "turn boys into girls," and articulates the most radical challenge to masculinity as it's now constructed. But he's not worried. He points to the rapid pace of change when it comes to all things gendered. He likes to tell the story of his daughter's driving test, where check-off boxes asked her to indicate not only any "change of address" and "change of name," but also any "change of sex."

"This is new!" he says exuberantly. "We're in an era where things move faster than ever before. Nobody knows what will happen. But we learned from women the price we pay for not talking about it."

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The feminist threat? If the world of ideas were a playground, Christina Hoff Sommers would be the girl kicking other kids in the shins. And, as you might expect, she is not exactly the most popular kid in theclass. In the field of boys' studies, Sommers has launched high-profile salvos recently with a cover article for the Atlantic Monthly and a new book, The War on Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men (Simon and Schuster). Her premise is similar to that of other authors in the field: she looks at boys' academic performance and test scores and detects something quite wrong. And she too bemoans the "climate of disapproval" surrounding boys. But there the similarities end. The boys'-studies authors blame society and outdated notions of masculinity. Sommers blames feminists and their excessive handwringing over an imaginary crisis among girls. And she delivers a traditionalist's lament: why can't we just turn back the clock and raise boys to be gentlemen? Sommers isn't a child specialist: she's a former Clark University philosophy professor and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank. She does not, like the researchers she attacks, go out and talk to boys. Her last book was Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women (Simon and Schuster, 1995), and her new book is largely a continuation of her campaign against feminists. For instance, Sommers dedicates two chapters solely to an attack on Harvard's Carol Gilligan, who argues that girls have been shortchanged by growing up in a patriarchally structured society. She also lights into male scholars sympathetic to feminists, such as Bill Pollack. Not surprisingly, the Boston boys'-studies authors, overall, are saddened by Sommers's work. Michael Thompson takes issue with Sommers's idea that to take care of our boys, we should stop trying to make things better for girls. "My view of human life as a psychologist is that there's plenty of suffering to go around," he says. "I find it dangerous," says Pollack of Sommers's view. "In all of recorded history, we've never solved anything by going backwards." Sommers's construction of the issue as a "war," he says, is "atavistic." Eli Newberger calls it "extremely destructive and anti-feminist." Or, as Michael Thompson sums it up, "This is not a chess game between the genders." -- Michelle Chihara

In one sense, all these authors are following in the footsteps of Mary Pipher's Reviving Ophelia and Peggy Orenstein's Schoolgirls and Myra and David Sadker's Failing at Fairness -- books of the '90s that outlined the tribulations of girls. Reviving Ophelia, in particular, was a runaway bestseller (it spent 149 weeks on the New York Times list) and a trailblazer.

But in another sense, the boys'-studies field is fighting a tougher battle for acceptance. That's because for all the school shootings, for all the Ritalin, for all the low reading scores, one fact remains: in many ways the system works for boys.

In Raising Cain, Thompson and Kindlon write: "When we first began working with and speaking about boys, a large part of our task was to convince skeptical parents and educators . . . that boys suffer deeply as a result of the destructive emotional training our culture imposes upon them, that many of them are in crisis, and that all of them need help. Perhaps because men enjoy so much power and prestige in society, there is a tendency to view boys as shoo-ins for future success."

The women's movement has lent great strength to organizations that formed to help girls, just as the civil-rights movement has close ties to groups that help minority kids. But the men's movement? The men's movement still seems like a punch line. Traditional masculinity may or may not be causing problems for boys, but there's no arguing with the fact that "manly" men, "real" men, win more than their fair share of power and prestige.

Ronald Levant, dean of psychology at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, founded the Fatherhood Project at Boston University in 1973, and is considered by some to be a father of masculinity studies in Boston. He puts it this way: "Men benefit a great deal from the current arrangement of society. So we shy away from the term `movement' . . . a movement implies 750,000 people marching on Washington. When you've got the most privileged group marching, it's a little like the aristocrats marching on Wall Street demanding more money."

So even if boys are suffering in schools and elsewhere, their advocates in the academy are careful to diffuse anger rather than whip it up. They have a difficult job, in some ways more difficult than demanding a redistribution of societal power. A challenge to masculinity, after all, isn't just a request to share power: it's a challenge to our very definition of power.

Gender roles and their power dynamics weave a complicated web of emotional and psychological patterns over us, some of which certainly have biological roots (even when they're not biological necessities). Gender is inescapable, the lens through which we filter experience -- one of the first things we know about ourselves is our sex. So it's hard to step outside gender to see the absurdity of partitioning human qualities and human experience into two mutually exclusive camps.

But absurd it is, the boys'-studies authors believe. "Gender roles are kind of cartoonish in how two-dimensional they are -- that men are always tough and aggressive and never feel anything, and women are very pretty and skinny and always sweet and nice," says Levant. "It's apparent that this is a fiction, and worse, it's a very destructive fiction."

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Michelle Chihara can be reached at mchihara[a]phx.com.