Tag Archives: Sex Differences

Commentary

Christina Hoff Sommers: helping boys succeed in school

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An article from the leftist Time magazine by feminist Christina Hoff Sommers. (H/T Independent Women’s Forum)

Excerpt:

Being a boy can be a serious liability in today’s classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won’t sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study, leads teachers to underestimate their intellectual and academic abilities. “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools,” says psychologist Michael Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls.”

These “defective girls” are not faring well academically. Compared with girls, boys earn lower grades, win fewer honors and are less likely to go to college. One education expert has quipped that if current trends continue, the last male will graduate from college in 2068. In today’s knowledge-based economy, success in the classroom has never been more crucial to a young person’s life prospects. Women are adapting; men are not.

Some may say, “Too bad for the boys.” The ability to regulate one’s impulses, sit still and pay attention are building blocks of success in school and in life. As one critic told me, the classroom is no more rigged against boys than workplaces are rigged against lazy or unfocused workers. That is absurd: unproductive workers are adults — not 5- and 6-year-old children who depend on us to learn how to become adults. If boys are restive and unfocused, we must look for ways to help them do better.

She introduces three ideas to fix the problem, and here’s the third one:

In his delightful Boy Writers: Reclaiming their Voices, celebrated author and writing instructor Ralph Fletcher advises teachers to consider their assignments from the point of view of boys. Too many writing teachers, he says, take the “confessional poet” as the classroom ideal. Personal narratives full of emotion and self-disclosure are prized; stories describing video games, skateboard competitions or a monster devouring a city are not.

Peg Tyre’s The Trouble With Boys illustrates the point. She tells the story of a third-grader in Southern Californianamed Justin who loved Star Wars, pirates, wars and weapons. An alarmed teacher summoned his parents to school to discuss a picture the 8-year-old had drawn of a sword fight — which included several decapitated heads. The teacher expressed “concern” about Justin’s “values.” The father, astonished by the teacher’s repugnance for a typical boy drawing, wondered if his son could ever win the approval of someone who had so little sympathy for the child’s imagination.

Teachers have to come to terms with the young male spirit. As Fletcher urges, if we want boys to flourish, we are going to have to encourage their distinctive reading, writing, drawing and even joke-telling propensities. Along with personal “reflection journals,” Fletcher suggests teachers permit fantasy, horror, spoofs, humor, war, conflict and, yes, even lurid sword fights.

If boys are constantly subject to disapproval for their interests and enthusiasms, they are likely to become disengaged and lag further behind. Our schools need to work with, not against, the kinetic imaginations of boys to move them toward becoming educated young men.

Dr. Sommers participated in a recent debate where she argued in favor of allowing all-male schools against a radical feminist. That page has audio and a transcript as well.

My thoughts

I do think that women need to realize that boys have to be encouraged to do the different things that boys do, if we want boys to be engaged. The good things that boys do in society are not free – they need to be encouraged and not dismissed. Playing a wargame or an adventurous boardgame with a boy is good. Firing real guns with a boy is good. Playing adventurous role-playing games with a boy is good. Going to a war museum or on a camping trip with a boy is good. Watching patriotic war movies or adventurous movies with a boy is good. Reading military history and military biographies is good. Reading classical adventure novels with a boy is good. Listening to adventurous music with a boy is good. Even watching the news with a boy is good.

Nothing is free. We have to create the boys we want, and encourage them to be aggressive, active and righteous.

News

Rasmussen poll finds that men are more pro-life than women

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Life News reports on a new poll that confirms the results from the previous Gallup poll, which showed that men are more likely to be pro-life than women.

Take a look:

A new Rasmussen poll out today shows the support for the pro-abortion side is at its lowest level in three years, while support for the pro-life position is at its highest.

Rasmussen asked: “Generally speaking, on the issue of abortion, do you consider yourself pro-choice or pro-life?”

The Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 46% of Likely U.S. Voters now consider themselves pro-choice, the lowest finding in three years of regular surveying. Forty-three percent (43%) say they are pro-life, matching the highest finding to date. Eleven percent (11%) are undecided.

And now the part that is very interesting:

Fifty percent (50%) of women consider themselves pro-choice, compared to 42% of men. Forty-six percent (46%) of men and 41% of women are pro-life.

Men are also more likely than women to say it is too easy to get an abortion in the United States and that there should be a waiting period. Women are more likely to think it’s too hard to get an abortion. Men are also more likely to feel abortion is morally wrong most of the time.

So, men are pro-life by a margin of 46-42. This is similar to the Gallup poll released in May 2013, that showed that men were pro-life by a margin of 50-42. I think that the first instinct of a man is to protect and provide for the unborn child. Men tend to want to take responsibility for their own decisions. And they are OK with giving up happiness and pleasure in order to sacrifice for the child. Men are more moved to protect things that are weak and vulnerable, even if it means that they will be less free to pursue their own pleasures. That’s how men really are, although that’s often not what women believe about men, and it’s not what is portrayed in the media about men.

In contrast, women are more likely to be pro-abortion, by a huge margin of 50-41. This is similar to the results from the Gallup poll of May 2013, which showed that women were more likely to be pro-abortion by a margin of 47-46.  The split is even large when you notice that women are overwhelmingly more likely to vote for the unrestricted abortion policies of the Democrat party. Exit polls from the last two federal elections have shown that unmarried women in particular vote for Democrats 67% of the time. That number is even higher when you look at young, unmarried women.

Not just unborn children, but born children

Previously, I also documented how polls show that men are far more pro-marriage than women.

Excerpt:

A new national poll points towards a gender gap over same-sex marriage.

According to new numbers released Monday morning from Gallup, 50% of Americans say same-sex marriages should be legal. But break it down by gender, and 56% of women say same-sex couples should be legally allowed to marry, but only 42% of men feel the same way.

So what do we learn from this? We learn that despite massive systemic challenges in the education system and the workplace, that men have nevertheless not given up on the needs of unborn and born children.

I notice that there is a trend among Christian women to try to blame men for abortion and gay marriage, and to try to say that the reason that women have abortions is because of men. But this is false, of course. The reason why women have abortions is because they deliberately prefer men who are bad boys. They are attracted to these men, and these men want premarital sex. They give them the sex in order to be liked by these bad men. They choose the bad men. The good men who are chaste and marriage minded are passed over. You can read about it in the article I blogged about earlier in the week about the hook-up culture, and see a study on the hook-up culture from the Institute of American Values too. And remember that the hook-up culture is praised by feminist leaders. They are the ones who wanted it.

Most women are attracted to bad men. Many cannot resist the attraction and choose the bad men. They are attracted to men who do not try to lead them or judge them on moral or spiritual issues. They go too far with them physically and bond to them and then cannot see their flaws. They eventually have sex with them to try to make them commit. Bad men don’t commit when they are given sex, though. Then the women vote for abortion to get out of it – because they feel that they are victims. Then they blame all men for their own bad choices and claim that the consequences of their actions could not be predicted. They make themselves out to be victims. But the real victims are the children and the good men who are passed over.

None of this would be happening if women thought through what they really wanted – lifelong married love – and then 1) prepared themselves to be wives and mothers and 2) chose chaste men who were prepared to be fathers and husbands. They choose the wrong men. They pass over good men because we are “too strict”. They deprive children of life or fathers. They blame men. It’s that simple. The problem is that we are too scared to tell women that they are wrong about how they choose men.

A recent survey sent to me by Nancy P. even found that men are more interested in marriage and commitment than women. When will we realize where the problem really lies? Blaming men isn’t the answer. We need to teach women to disregard the tingles and the peer pressure and pick the right man for the jobs of husband and father, based on the requirements of the male roles. And that means that we need to roll back feminism, and defeat the idea that man have no roles. Marriage-capable men only turn away from male roles when they see that women are not interested in marriage-minded men.

News

Support for my view of courting from… Jane Austen?!!

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I get into a lot of trouble because I have this loooong list of questions that I pose to women during courtship in order to evaluate them for marriage, and to let them know how I want them to prepare for my plan for the marriage.   Basically, my view of courting is that it is the time for the man to present his plan to serve God as a married couple, and where he wants to be effective, and how he wants to be effective, and where the woman fits into to his plan. The purpose of the pre-marriage courting is for me to explain all of this, and then the woman has the opportunity to first decide if she wants to help with that plan and then demonstrate that she can help with it. My job after laying out the plan is to make sure that she has all the tools she needs and lots of affection and tenderness, too. I am auditioning for the roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. And she is auditioning for the roles of helper, motivator and nurturer.

Anyway, all of that is evil, if you ask any non-Christians and Christians today. The ladies in my workplace are always telling me that I am “too strict” and that I need to “lower my standards”. What they mean by this is that they resent me taking on the role of leader in the relationship and telling them what marriage to me will be about and what they need to be able to do to help. And they especially resent having to prove that they can do it. Men they’ve known in the past have been pacified with some earnest words of agreement, and maybe some hugs and kisses. But that doesn’t work on me. I want books to be read, and actions to be performed.

For example, I want public speeches defending marriage, presentations on abortion in church, apologetics book clubs, apologetics conference organizing, apologetics lectures and debates in the local university, economics degrees, law school degrees, and pro-family conservative political views. (These are all the things my current favorite lady and her predecessors have done / are doing). In short, if I am coming to the table with lots of evidence that I can do my roles, then I want to see evidence that she  can do her roles. I call this view of courtship the wisdom view, and the popular alternative to it I call the fairy tale view.

The funniest thing is that right now I am working together with a woman who is very very high up in her profession. Manages dozens of people, has her own receptionist, wins lots of awards. Her job is incredibly stressful. But the funniest thing is that she is actually the easiest one of all to lead. And that’s because she is a good listener and she reads a ton of books and then independently designs and executes operations designed to move the ball forward on the things that I care about. She thinks my vision for serving God is good, and she knows how to get the job done, without being micromanaged. Here is a close-up of some flowers that I sent her recently to recognize her. She is also the least attention seeking female of the ones I know. She doesn’t want public recognition for what she does.

And with that said, let’s take a look at a quote about my favorite British author, Jane Austen, courtesy of Reformed Seth’s blog:

[Austen] was committed to the ideal of “intelligent love,” according to which the deepest and truest relationship that can exist between human beings is pedagogic. This relationship consists in the giving and receiving of knowledge about right conduct, in the formation of one person’s character by another, the acceptance of another’s guidance in one’s growth. The idea of a love based in pedagogy may seem quaint to some modern readers and repellent to others, but unquestionably it plays a decisive part in the power and charm of Jane Austen’s art. And if we attempt to explain the power and charm that the genre of the novel exercised in the nineteenth century, we must take full account of its pedagogic intention and of such love as a reader might feel was being directed towards him in the solicitude of the novel for his moral well-being, in its concern for the right course of his development.

– Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 82.

There! I’m vindicated by someone who ought to know how these things work. When I was a young man, I read everything I could get my hands on from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. It’s nice to know that I wasn’t misinterpreting what they were telling me, and that I’ve applied it well. Just because it’s not “cool” today, doesn’t mean it’s not right.

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