Hell hath no fury like
an American feminist. If you've ever met the professional variety, you
will learn that soon enough. You will discover as well that any attempt
at rational dialogue with such a person is enough to prompt a torrent of
abuse that is now one of the mainstays of the American left.
I say this as someone
who believes wholeheartedly in equality of opportunity for men and women.
You name a political and civil right, and I think women should have it.
But my sin is to persist in the naive belief that men and women are actually
constitutively different beings, with different biological and psychological
profiles that may sometimes demand different treatment.
For the better part
of two decades now, this belief has been anathema among American elites.
Single-sex education is close to illegal. The American military has been
turned into an institution in which male aggression has been usurped by
female input at every turn. Under the guidance of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
the Supreme Court has slowly rendered any different treatment for men and
women in any public place unconstitutional.
And under the tutelage
of an academic establishment wedded to the notion that gender itself is
a cultural construct, American education and even medicine have been rendered
relentlessly anti-male.
At Harvard, a group
of sociologists is hard at work developing new school curricula to erase
any behavioural differences between boys and girls from early childhood
on.
The result? Well,
the results are in the papers every day. Delinquent males, denied effective
discipline in school and forced into female-friendly environments, are
dropping out of educational establishments at higher and higher rates.
The college population is now 55% women, 45% men.
The American department
of education reported in 1998 that the reading proficiency gap between
boys and girls in school is now close to one and a half years of schooling
- with girls way ahead. According to the medical profession, there is an
epidemic of "attention deficit disorder" among American boys.
There is a crisis
of American manhood going on. The bad news is that American men seem to
be getting dumber, meaner and poorer as the years go by. The good news
is that some people are getting brave enough to say so. A new book, to
be published next month, The War Against Boys, by Christina Hoff Sommers,
lays out plenty of horror stories of the new educational consensus.
Boys are essentially
being told that what comes naturally to them - rough-and-tumble play, confrontation,
physicality, mischief - are psychological disorders. In one school, boys
were disciplined for making guns out of their fingers and pretending to
shoot at one another. Seven-year-old boys found kissing or teasing girls
are sometimes expelled on sexual harassment charges.
Another recent book
to tackle the feminist orthodoxy of gender-as-culture is John Colapinto's
moving study of a Canadian infant boy who was the victim of a botched circumcision
at eight months and had his penis burnt off.
He was born in the
mid-1960s and, following the doctrine of gender-as-cultural-construct,
the doctors advised his parents to remove the boy's genitals altogether
and make him into a little girl.
By a fluke, the boy
had an identical twin who grew up as a normal boy while he - given the
name of "Brenda" - was dressed in girl's clothes and reared as a member
of the female sex.
At the time, the medical
establishment hailed the surgery as a brilliant success, and cited Brenda
as proof positive of the cultural origins of gender. Then, mysteriously,
Brenda disappeared from the scientific literature. Intrigued, Colapinto
tracked her down and found "him" working in an abattoir in Winnipeg.
It turns out that
Brenda was beyond miserable as a little girl. Although denied the truth
about her real gender until she was 14, she insisted on wearing boy's clothes
and playing rough sports. It was only when her parents thought she might
commit suicide that she was told the truth.
She subsequently took
testosterone, had a double mastectomy, married a woman and now has three
adopted children. Call her David. That's who he is. As Nature Made Him,
as the book title has it.
The unique nature
of this story - with an identical twin as a control group - should persuade
any reasonable person that gender is something buried deep in human biology.
It is about as culturally constructed as the colour of your eyes.
From the minute the
Y chromosome triggers testosterone in the womb, boys and girls are programmed
differently.
Because this difference
was used in the past to justify male oppression does not mean it can be
denied. And its persistence is testimony to its power. Nature cannot be
foiled, merely derailed.
What is happening
now in America is the slow crumbling of an ideological edifice that was
constructed with perfectly good intentions on the basis of a lie. Too bad
that several generations of boys and men have been the victims of that
lie. And too bad that few people until now have had the courage and intellectual
honesty to expose it.
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