The “War on Boys” Narrative Is Back. Ugh.

The “War on Boys” Narrative Is Back. Ugh.




Every year as a new school semester begins, someone writes an ominous article about the fact that more women are graduating from college these days than men. The latest hand-wringing salvo comes from famed anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly, and it’s a doozy. Schlafly wrote on World Net Daily earlier this week that not only is this imbalance bad for men, but also for women, since a dearth of males on campus puts a crimp in women’s plans to find husbands, leading them instead to pursue meaningless sex. Schlafly writes:
Anybody who understands human nature realizes that this situation changes behavior. Girls do not want to get left out in the cold, so they compete for men on men’s terms. This results in more casual hookups that are dead-end encounters with no future and no real romantic relationships.

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********More outrageously, Schlafly claims this gender ratio is responsible for all the sexual assaults that are suddenly happening on campuses nationwide:
“The imbalance of far more women than men at colleges has been a factor in the various sex scandals that have made news in the last couple of years,” she writes, completely ignoring the fact that the reason there have been so many scandals lately is that victims are no longer keeping quiet about what’s happening to them or letting cagey administrations sweep everything under the rug.**********

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That ratio doesn’t apply to top-tier schools. The Ivies showed a much more even ratio in the class of 2018, with some, like Harvard (55 to 45 percent), and Princeton (51 to 48 percent) accepting more men than women.
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These women teachers, critics like Christina Hoff Summers say, are discriminating against naturally rambunctious boys by demanding that they sit still in class. Since girls are, allegedly by nature, much better at being placid, they are rewarded. And worse, this squashing of boys’ natural exuberance—often with prescription drugs—has become more pronounced in the last 20 years, as the women’s movement has gained momentum and feminized the educational system with its dominant female teachers and their insistence on good behavior in class.
But women didn’t build the system. Yes, teaching has been a woman-dominated profession in this country since the 19th century, when Western Expansion allowed educated women to make their own money in a respectable fashion. But the expectation that pupils must sit still and pay attention is not some recent emasculating feminist conspiracy. Since antiquity, teachers have cracked down on pupils who act out in class, only not with Ritalin but with beatings.
The most masculine education systems in this country—military and parochial—have little-to-no tolerance for pupils of either gender acting up in class. Self-control is both valued and expected. Learning to work in a unit, to accept one’s place in the hierarchy, and taking responsibility for one’s actions are seen as crucial to success, as part of being an honorable man.

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http://msmagazine.com/blog/2015/01/09/war-on-boys/