"... from academia to Hollywood that remains critical of more conservative lifestyles. While the country rightfully spent recent decades boosting the educational and economic prospects of women, it deindustrialized, axing and outsourcing jobs in heavily male industries, and leaving men and women increasingly out of step with one another. Efforts to make the workforce and education system more friendly for girls have led to emphasizing literacy and verbal skills, a hemorrhaging of male teachers, and the decline of shop classes and vocational programs.... The trend line of women reporting a declining desire to marry may indeed reflect pessimism about their prospects rather than the institution itself — and not for ideological reasons so much as practical ones...."
Jashinsky, as a 7-year-old girl, was one of the kids portrayed in the Christina Hoff Sommers book “The War Against Boys,” which came out in 2000, and she also worked as an intern on the re-release of the book in 2012.
It seems that both men and women regard the members of the opposite sex as unworthy of marriage.
"On that trip, the reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., got into a series of heated arguments with students, none of them Black, on the charged question of race. Their complaints would ultimately end his career as a high-profile public health reporter for The Times, and again put The Times at the center of the national argument over journalism and racism and labor.... The student at the center of this story is Sophie Shepherd, who isn’t among the teenagers who have spoken anonymously to other news organizations. She and two other students said she was the person who spoke the most to Mr. McNeil and spent the most time with him on their 'student journey.' She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best."
My God. Last night DC protesters intimidated people in a restaurant. Ordered them to raise their fists in protest. Anyone who disobeyed was viciously denounced for supporting “white supremacy.” Distressing video of bullying posing as activism.👇🏻 https://t.co/PUODHoJUJJ
After writing the last post, about a WaPo column by Alyssa Rosenberg, I clicked on my "Alyssa Rosenberg" tag. It only had 2 other posts. One, from a year ago, was to another WaPo column ("Hillary Clinton and I are done"), but the other was from 2009, about whether long novels are still worth reading. It was a clip from a Bloggingheads diavlog, Rosenberg with Matt Yglesias, and I needed to fix some code, so I clicked through to the Bloggingheads website. I saw that there was a new diavlog with Bob Wright and Christina Hoff Sommers. I'm interested in that, but it goes on for more than 2 hours, so I decided to click on one of the subtopics that jumped out, "Bob denies Christina’s charge of 'benevolent sexism.'" Here's the clip...
Hoff Sommers criticized Wright for "benevolent sexism" because of the way he'd diavlogged with a feminist philosopher. Instead of going at it with her, he babied the female philosopher with softball questions. Okay. Wright says he wants to defend himself and: "I've done dialogues with Ann Althouse that got so contentious that she accused me of being sexist in the other sense, of being too hard on her."
Bizarre. I'm just idly clicking around. I didn't expect to hear my own name. And now I feel called upon to correct the record. I didn't say it was sexist to be "too hard" or "contentious." I don't like that characterization, and now I feel sort of nauseated. Good lord, what all do people say about you when you're not around? Stumbling into one example, it makes me wonder! What a strange world!
Wright was referring to this diavlog with me from February 2017, which was the last time I talked with him. Watch this clip and you may see why I'm annoyed to be characterized as having called him sexist for being too hard on me. What's sexist is that he treats me differently and with far more hostility than he treats the men who engage vigorously and give him a hard time. He's never had me back on the show after this:
If you watch that clip, you'll see that I'm talking about how podcast listeners might not want to hear yelling. Wright volunteers that every time he talks to me he ends up yelling. "9 out of 10 of my podcast conversations do not involve this level of voice raising, however, all of the ones involving you do." That's what makes me want to do feminist analysis, which I introduce in the form of asking him "What's your analysis of that?" He says he doesn't know, so I tell him what my husband says: "He says that you should at least pretend to be enjoying speaking to me and that you should show appreciation for me and, whether you actually feel it or not, to make it feel like this is a fun, enjoyable conversation, this is a good place to be as opposed to an intense struggle."
I'm really talking about the aesthetics of radio at that point, the subjective experience of the brain between the earbuds, the listener. Wright repeats that he usually doesn't raise his voice, and I say, "but you do with me" and suggest again that it could be "analyzed." I remind him that I was the only woman on Bloggingheads in the early days. I say, "To some extent, I feel I'm being badgered and bullied because I'm a woman (and because you perceive me as conservative, even though I'm not)." I never use the word "sexism," but at 89:00, he tells me I've accused him of sexism.
Anyway, my objection wasn't to tough opposition and hardcore debate, it's about getting yelled at and treated with disrespect. Something about me triggers him, and he came right out and admitted it, but he resisted any sort of analysis of why. I think it's shallow (or repressive) not to want to consider whether there's a gender element to why another person is aggravating you so much. I'd go on the show — back when I got invited — and, as you can see, I'm smiling and really into the joys of conversation. Why is he yelling at me?!
More detail here, including what appears to be the identification of the protesters, which I won't copy, because I feel so embarrassed for them and hope they can find a way to stop being obnoxious and start making sense. Notice that they're at their best when they create an atmosphere of unreason. When some people try to reason with them and invite them into a middle position of engaging in debate — which really isn't fair to the speaker — they look baffled and — like so many law students in so many law school classrooms throughout the ages — woefully unprepared.
The main protester is wearing a jacket that says "STAY WOKE" on the back, and she keeps looking at what may be her mobile phone, perhaps to get the words for shouting at the other protesters to shout back (that is, to "mic check"). The other protesters are backed up against the wall about as far as they can get from the formidable figure of Christina Hoff Sommers:
Campus safety asked @CHSommers if it was true that she came armed with a gun for security purposes. Christina’s response? “My Malti-pooh Izzy is my security but she’s not here.” pic.twitter.com/Mcf3GLmiuG
"Are We Raising Sexist Sons?" is the front page teaser, with the subheading: "We’ve pushed our daughters to excel. But have we failed to teach inclusion to our boys?"
"Do We Need to Change the Way We Raise Boys?" is the title at the page where the forum begins (which is also marked "Updated"). When you click through to the individual essays — there are 5 — the sidebar gets us back to the title of the forum that appears on the front-page teaser: "Are We Raising Sexist Sons?" The subheading is different: "We've come so far in redefining gender roles and raising our daughters' expectations, but have we failed to teach inclusion to our boys?"
There's an interesting difference between pushing our daughters to excel (and the relationship to some failure to teach the boys to be inclusive (which might suggest that boys should back off on their own efforts to excel) and redefining gender roles (which doesn't seem to be squarely about striving to win in a competitive field that, when girls arrive, includes more players).
[I]ntegrating football teams in junior high so girls have more options is hardly the most pressing equity issue in education. Boys are now the have-nots in education. The real challenge for the nation’s schools is to make the classroom more inclusive — for boys.
(The forum is kicked off by an anecdote about a boy who mocked a girl who wanted to play football.)
Ironically, the ad milks emotions, with mawkish violins and the sad faces of young girls — every single one of whom is pretty. There's nothing scientific about this presentation.
And that's quite aside from the iffy statistics that Christina Hoff Sommers highlights in her critique, here (via Instapundit):
My favorite part of that critique is the part that begins at 4:00: The ad "conveys the message that science is masculine," and "conventional girl culture" is "shown as an obstacle to girls' science careers." It's as if what is feminine is inherently bad, and what's masculine is good, so shake off the feminine and be masculine. That's misogyny, precisely.
In this light, consider how we treat boys who feel drawn to girly things. I'm thinking of the "Go Carolina" chapter in the David Sedaris collection "Me Talk Pretty One Day." As a 5th-grader, he's one of the students chosen for speech therapy:
None of the therapy students were girls. They were all boys like me who kept movie star scrapbooks and made their own curtains. “You don’t want to be doing that,” the men in our families would say. “That’s a girl thing.” Baking scones and cupcakes for the school janitors, watching Guiding Light with our mothers, collecting rose petals for use in a fragrant potpourri: anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing. In order to enjoy ourselves, we learned to be duplicitous. Our stacks of Cosmopolitan were topped with an unread issue of Boy’s Life or Sports Illustrated, and our decoupage projects were concealed beneath the sporting equipment we never asked for but always received. When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up. “A policeman or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.” Symptoms were feigned, and our mothers wrote notes excusing our absences on the day of the intramural softball tournament. Brian had a stomach virus or Ted suffered from that twenty-four-hour bug.
Anything worth doing turned out to be a girl thing... Now, there's some material for an "Inspire Her Mind" ad we never see. Or for an "Inspire His Mind" ad....
"Early childhood educators and social workers can expect to earn around $36,000 and $39,000, respectively. By contrast, petroleum engineering and metallurgy degrees promise median earnings of $120,000 and $80,000. Not many aspiring early childhood educators would change course once they learn they can earn more in metallurgy or mining. The sexes, taken as a group, are somewhat different. Women, far more than men, appear to be drawn to jobs in the caring professions; and men are more likely to turn up in people-free zones. In the pursuit of happiness, men and women appear to take different paths."
ADDED: If working with people is considered a plus, such that job-seekers accept lower pay to have that kind of work, is there a problem? What if job-seekers tended to feel it was bad to have to work with others and avoided these jobs? The pay would go up. I think what we're seeing is that working with people is more likely to be a plus among women, and there are a lot of female job-seekers bidding the price down. You might say this is acceptable because it's not intentional discrimination against women; it's just everyone making individual personal choices, and a neutral market producing this effect. Those who still see a problem and want us to care should find a way to say it still matters, because the skewed preferences of women are leading to a disparate impact. I just wish they'd say that clearly and be accurate about the facts and not continually prod people to feel that there are nefarious employers deliberately short-changing women.
"But in stark contrast to the United States, these countries are energetically, even desperately, looking for ways to help boys improve," writes Christina Hoff Sommers in The Atlantic.
1. Focusing on breasts works for everybody: Men love breasts and women feel cared for.
2. Treating women's bodies as a special problem, requiring special attention, works for the most retrograde traditionalists and for progressive feminists.
3. Women tend to monitor their health and consume more health care services, especially these preventive programs. There are no programs for men, because men wouldn't respond to programs. The main use of men is getting them into the insurance pool to contribute to the cost of caring for women and children.
4. Women actually need and deserve more care. Men are expendable. There is a shared social interest in preserving the women for reproductive purposes, for the maintenance of stable households, for the nurturing of children, and for looking after the elderly.
Video found after a search for "making women nod" — which I knew was a longstanding Bill Maher theme — which I got the idea to do after writing about Barack Obama saying 51 times in "Dreams From My Father" that people "nodded". It was probably a meaningless writerly tic from a neophyte writer, but perhaps it's significant. Whatever you think of Maher, listen to the montage about the emasculation of men as manifested in the behavior of making women nod. Then think about the agenda of the Democratic Party, their asserted pacifist position in the so-called War on Women, their mascot "Julia," and things of that sort.
Do you stand by your earlier critique? "I think Obama must respond to this problem. If a huge federal jobs program is really what we need — and I'm not willing to say it is — then how can nearly all the job be men's jobs?"
In other words, weren't you one of the feminist critics that Sommers is talking about?
I did add "Is it enough of an answer to say that it's up to women to take up the hard physical labor of building roads and bridges and the like?" Those were 2 questions. Generally, I will stand by my preference for good solutions tailored to actual problems.
I've been ignoring that book "Manliness" by Harvy C. Mansfield, but Christina Hoff Sommers is writing about it -- in the Weekly Standard -- so I'm going to pay some attention:
After almost 40 years of feminist agitation and gender-neutral pronouns, it is still men who are far more likely than women to run for political office, start companies, file for patents, and blow things up. Men continue to tell most of the jokes and write the vast majority of editorials and letters to editors.
(And blogs.)
And--fatal to the dreams of feminists who long for social androgyny--men have hardly budged from their unwillingness to do an equal share of housework or childcare. Moreover, women seem to like manly men: "Manliness is still around, and we still find it attractive," says Mansfield.
We? Harvey's a guy. And while I'm here, let me say that the arithmetic on the housework sharing question is always screwy. There is no whole from which to figure out what half is. If you think an hour a day is the right total and your partner thinks an hour a week is the right total, how much does he need to do to avoid the charge that he hasn't done his share?
Skipping way ahead in the article (past a long section on philosophy that I won't try to summarize):
What would Mansfield have us do?...
First of all, he thinks we should clearly distinguish between the public realm and private life. In public we should pursue, as best we can, a policy of gender neutrality. He firmly believes that the law should guarantee equal opportunity to men and women. However, "our expectations should be that men will grasp the opportunity more readily and more wholeheartedly than women."
Though he mentions it only in passing, it follows from his position that our schools should be more respectful and accepting of male spiritedness; they must stop trying to feminize boys. A healthy society should not war against human nature. It should, he says, "reemploy masculinity." That means it has to civilize it and give it things to do. No civilization can achieve greatness if it does not allow room for obstreperous males.
In the private sphere, his advice is vivé la difference! A woman should not expect a manly man to be as committed to domesticity as she is; nor should she assume that he is as emotionally adept as her female friends. Manly men are romantic rather than sensitive. They need a lot of help from females to ascend to the higher ethical levels of manhood, and Mansfield urges women to encourage them in ways respectful of their male pride.
A classic feminist question is why must it be women's job to make men good? One answer is that men will be so horribly bad if we don't.
ADDED: I hate when I have to get out my sledgehammer, but some hotheads writing about me elsewhere don't get my sarcasm. I heartily resist the notion that it is women's work to make men good.
Christina Hoff Sommers describes the College Republicans' response to the overpromotion of "The Vagina Monologues" at Roger Williams University and the predictably repressive/humorless response from the admininstration. Read the whole piece (in the National Review), but here's a funny excerpt:
The week before V-Day, the Roger Williams campus was plastered with flyers emblazoned with slogans such as “My Vagina is Flirty” and “My Vagina is Huggable.” There was a widely publicized “orgasm workshop.” On the day of the play, the V-warriors sold lollipops in the in the shape of–-guess what? Last year, the student union was flooded with questionnaires asking unsuspecting students questions like “What does your Vagina smell like?” None of this offended the administration or elicited any reprimands, probations, or confiscations.
The campus conservatives artfully (in the college sense of "artful") mimicked the V-Day campaign. They papered the school with flyers that said, “My penis is majestic” and “My penis is hilarious.” The caption on one handout read, “My Penis is studious.” It showed Testaclese [the P-Day penis-shaped mascot] reclining on a couch reading Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America....
It is easy to understand why school officials would not want a six-foot phallus wandering around campus; nor why they would ask students not to paper the college with posters describing all the things it likes to do. But that is just the sort of thing the vagina warriors have been doing, year after year, on hundreds of campuses.
Very funny! Seems to me the university shouldn't be engaging in viewpoint discrimination. There should be vagina/penis parity. Quite aside from all of this, why isn't everyone tired of "The Vagina Monologues" by now? It was always a bad play.
UPDATE: Be at Bebere has an answer to that last question.
I'd say it was Christina Hoff Sommers, this past Wednesday, promoting her book about how the self-esteem movement in schools has gone too far. The tales she had to tell -- about "Circle of Friends" replacing tag and the demand that the red correction pen give way to lavender -- really connected with the audience, who seemed quite eager to receive this info. They were prepped, I think, by some combination of their own school experiences and "South Park." And Stewart did not make it easy for her. His approach was to challenge whether her little anecdotes represented anything other than some highly affluent enclaves. Every time he made this move, she shot out some little thing -- "The Girl Scouts have an anti-stress badge" -- that made the audience burst into spontaneous laughter. And you know it would not be their normal thing to give a warm welcome to a right-ish guest.
Regrettably, the Sommers interview is not included on the best interviews page at the "Daily Show" site. (You can, however, see the Dennis Miller interview. He, too, did well. I felt bad for him when he expressed his envy of the "Daily Show's" audience, which was, apparently, visibly way hipper than the crowd he's stuck with out in California.)
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