War Against Boys - Jonah

War against Boys - Jonah Goldberg

In this article, author Jonah Goldberg argues that a "war against boys" has resulted in disturbing changes in the schoolyard. Competition has been eliminated, in favor of encouraging everyone's participation and avoiding hurt feelings. Goldberg rails against this "touchy-feely" environment, one that curbs young boys' natural tendency towards competition and therefore prevents them from growing into men. Borrowing heavily from Christina Hoff Sommers' The War Against Boys, Goldberg lays the blame for this horror of a schoolyard squarely at the feet of "academic feminists" who have turned boys into an "endangered species."

The author therefore subscribes to the idea that the advancement of the rights and needs of girls somehow constitutes a war against boys. Goldberg believes that the goal of gaining gender parity in education, of improving the educational experience for girls, necessarily takes away from the experience of boys. There is a dichotomy between the two, and for Goldberg at least, the idea of improving education for girls and for boys is mutually-exclusive.

To bolster this thesis, Goldberg relies on little more than anecdotal evidence. There is a school in Sayville, NJ where signs such as "If you had fun, you won" are posted in the gymnasium. In this one school dodge ball has been permanently banned, and everyone gets a ribbon for participating in a sport. Without citing further evidence, Goldberg presents this one school as a trend. Further along the article, Goldberg cites that "girls read more books" and that more "girls go to college." These facts are again cited as constituting a war against boys. In Goldberg's mind, encouraging young girls to pursue higher education constitutes "remov (al of) opportunities" for boys.

Goldberg thus makes several faulty assumptions in this article. The first one is that agitating for a good experience for girls in elementary, secondary and higher education somehow takes away from the boys and men. Why should this be so?

If the educational experience of boys is slipping, then this is an issue that should concern everyone.

Education should be a good experience for all children - male or female. Feminists have recognized previously that young girls were being shortchanged, a fact that should have concerned everyone in society (including Goldberg). To say that the education of boys slipped simply because feminists improved the education of girls is a post hoc fallacy.

Second, Goldberg ignores that there are many other issues that affect girls once they are out of college. Even if they do better academically, this does not translate to gender parity in the working world. There is still a significant wage gap between the genders, and women remain underrepresented in many leadership positions in the corporate world. These statistics challenge Goldberg's suggestion that boys suffer into manhood due to their lack of a rough-and-tumble education.