http://www.claremont.org/writings/crb/fall2005/sailer.html
Boys Will Be Boys
A review of Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know
about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, by Leonard Sax
By Steve Sailer
Until last winter, I had assumed that fundamentalist feminism had
peaked in the early 1990s with the Anita Hill brouhaha, and that Bill
Clinton's political survival in 1998, which hinged on his
near-unanimous support from hypocritical feminists, ended the era in
which anyone took feminism seriously.
The Larry Summers fiasco, however, showed that while feminism may have
entered its Brezhnev Era intellectually, it still commands the
institutional equivalent of Brezhnev's thousands of tanks and nuclear
missiles. After just a few days, Harvard President Lawrence Summers
caved in to critics of his off-hand comment that nature, not invidious
discriminations alone, might be to blame for the lower percentage of
women who study math and science. In short order, he propitiated the
feminists by promising, in effect, to spend $50 million taking teaching
and research opportunities at Harvard away from male jobseekers and
giving them to less talented women.
Perhaps in a saner society, then, we would have less need for Leonard
Sax's engaging combination of popular science exposition and advice
guidebook, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know
about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences. But parents as well as
professors could benefit from it now.
Sax speaks of "gender" when he means "sex"-male or female. I fear,
though, that this usage battle is lost because the English language
really does need two different words to distinguish between the fact,
and the act, of sex. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg claims
her secretary Millicent invented the use of "gender" to mean "sex" in
the early 1970s while typing the crusading feminist's briefs against
sex discrimination. Millicent pointed out to her boss that judges, like
all men, have dirty minds when it comes to the word "sex," so she
should use the boring term "gender" to keep those animals thinking only
about the law.
Unfortunately, "gender" now comes with a vast superstructure of 99%
fact-free feminist theorizing about how sex differences are all just
socially constructed. According to this orthodoxy, it's insensitive to
doubt a burly transvestite truck driver demanding a
government-subsidized sex change when he says he feels like a little
girl inside. Yet it's also insensitive to assume that the average
little girl feels like a little girl inside.
Fortunately, Sax, a family physician and child psychologist, subscribes
to none of the usual cant. Indeed, I thought I was a connoisseur of sex
differences until I read Why Gender Matters, where I learned in the
first chapter, for instance, that girls on average hear better than
boys, especially higher-pitched sounds, such as the typical
schoolteacher's voice, which is one little-known reason girls on
average pay more attention in class.
Males and females also tend to have different kinds of eyeballs, with
boys better at tracking movement and girls better at distinguishing
subtle shades of colors. Presumably, these separate skills evolved when
men were hunters trying to spear fleeing game and women were gatherers
searching out the ripest fruit. So, today, boys want to catch fly balls
and girls want to discuss whether to buy the azure or periwinkle skirt.
Cognitive differences are profound and pervasive. Don't force boys to
explain their feelings in great detail, Sax advises. Their brains
aren't wired to make that as enjoyable a pastime as it is for girls.
* * *
As founder of the national association for Single-Sex Public Education,
Sax's favorite and perhaps most valuable theory is that co-educational
schooling is frequently a mistake. He makes a strong case, especially
concerning the years immediately following puberty. He cites the
experience of two psychologists studying self-esteem in girls. They
went to Belfast, where children can be assigned fairly randomly to coed
or single-sex schools:
They found that at coed schools, you don't need to ask a dozen
questions to predict the girl's self-esteem. You have to ask only one
question: "Do you think you're pretty?"
Similarly, the Coleman Report found, four decades ago, that boys put
more emphasis on sports and social success in coed schools, and less on
intellectual development. Sax argues:
Here's the paradox: coed schools tend to reinforce gender
stereotypes.... There is now very strong evidence that girls are more
likely to take courses such as computer science and physics in
girls-only schools.... Boys in single-sex schools are more than twice
as likely to study art, music, foreign languages, and literature as
boys of equal ability attending comparable coed schools.
Noting that the Department of Education projects that by 2011 there
will be 140 women college graduates for every 100 men, he asks, "I'm
all in favor of women's colleges, but...why are nominally coed schools
looking more and more like all-women's colleges?" So far, the decline
of male academic achievement in the U.S. is mostly among blacks and
Hispanics, but the catastrophic downturn into "laddism" of young white
males in England in recent years, and their consequent decline in test
scores, shows that no race is permanently immune to the prejudice that
school is for girls.
Of course, American schools have long been taught largely by women, and
boys and schoolmarms have not always seen eye-to-eye. But the rise of
feminism has encouraged female teachers to view their male students as
overprivileged potential oppressors. Further, feminism justifies
teachers' self-absorption with female feelings. Thus, a remarkable
fraction of the novels my older son has been assigned to read in high
school are about girls getting raped. I hope it hasn't permanently
soured him on fiction.
We've now achieved the worst of both worlds: the educational
authorities are committed to anti-male social constructionist ideology,
but the pop culture market delivers the crudest, most sexualized
imagery. The irony is that when the adult world imposes gender
egalitarianism on young people in the name of progressive ideologies,
it just makes the young people even more cognizant of their primordial
differences.
* * *
Sax's book often resembles a nonfiction version of Tom Wolfe's
impressive novel I am Charlotte Simmons. What's most striking about
Wolfe's merely semi-satirical portrait of Duke University is how, after
35 years of institutionalized feminism, student sexuality hasn't
evolved into an egalitarian utopia. Instead, it has regressed to
something that a caveman would understand-a sexual marketplace where
muscles are the measure of the man.
Not all of Sax's arguments are so dependable. For instance, he is far
more confident that homosexuality is substantially genetic in origin
than is the leading researcher he cites in support of his assertion, J.
Michael Bailey of Northwestern University. Bailey has publicly noted
how challenging he has found it to assemble a reliably representative
sample of identical and fraternal twins for his homosexuality studies.
Further, Bailey is troubled by the fundamental objection that natural
selection would, presumably, cause genes for homosexuality to die out.
Sax, though, races past these prudent concerns.
Still, this is a better than average advice book for mothers and
fathers. Most parenting books are unrealistic because they
overemphasize how much parents can mold their children's personalities.
Raising a second child, with his normally quite different personality,
typically undermines parents' belief in their omnipotence, but most
child-rearing books hush this up because their market is gullible
first-timers. Fortunately, by emphasizing how much you need to
fine-tune your treatment to fit your child's sex, Why Gender Matters
injects some needed realism into the genre.
But Sax's bulletproof confidence in his own advice gives me pause.
Sixteen years of fatherhood have left me less confident that I know
what I'm doing than when I started, but he doesn't suffer from any such
self-skepticism.
