Atlantic mag scribe Hanna Rosin’s “The End of Men-How Women Are Taking Control of Everything” depicts a brave (or perhaps feeling) new world in which women rule. I found the Rosin matriarchy as disturbing as radical feminists must find that awful patriarchy of yore.
William Tucker admits that Rosin is somewhat aware of some of the anti-boy measures in our education system. But she doesn’t grasp the extent to which the (to borrow a term from Christina Hoff Sommers) the war against boys is responsible for this state of affairs:
The main reason Americans seem to prefer girls, however, is that people don’t want to deal with boys anymore. Girls are serious, compliant, well behaved and not afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder or any of the names we have attached to boys’ rough-and-tumble ways. Boys have just about been written out of schools, where the curriculum has been totally revised to fit girls’ tastes. When my sons started in grade school, I was amazed at how the teachers (mostly female) continually used the word “feel” for “think.” (“What do you FEEL about the story Lisa has just read?”) Math no longer involves manipulating numbers but interpreting long word problems that are supposed to be “more representative of real life.” The main scientific discipline is “environmental science,” which mostly means lamenting human activity (most of it dreamed up by men, of course) while trying to feel closer to nature. In progressive Berkeley they are talking about eliminating advanced science labs altogether because women and minorities don’t find them interesting.
When boys arrive at elite colleges they are likely to be subjected to “orientation programs” in which they learn they have spent all their lives oppressing women and that all their natural impulses are now illegal. They will soon find the swim team, the wrestling squad or some other favorite sport no longer exists because, under Title IX, not enough girls would go out for equivalent sports.
The latest development has been the elimination of walk-ons — non-scholarship athletes who have not been recruited in high school but try out anyway hoping to make the team. The evil prototype here is Rudy, the 1993 movie about Rudy Ruettiger, a Notre Dame football walk-on who sat on the bench for four years before being allowed in for one play — and sacked the quarterback. Almost all walk-ons are men. This upsets the one-to-one gender balance required by Title IX. In response, team rosters have been trimmed, junior varsity eliminated altogether and thousands and thousands of young men told they can’t try out for sports because an equal number of girls won’t do the same.