How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men, 2000, Simon & Schuster, NY, 251 pages

Christina is a self-described feminist, who is a former professor of philosophy, and a top flight investigative social reporter. She wrote something else titled Who Stole Feminism?

Ms. Sommers deconstructs the agenda of the feminists and liberal males who are knee deep in reengineering American boys into socially pliable androgynous creatures; turning the Old Testament myth of Eve being made by God from Adam’s rib on its head, as they attack male neurology and biology through government schooling and a female prism.

The first portion of the book details the war against boys, justified as a struggle to ‘save girls’ from ‘patriarchy’. The complicity of the press in this social engineering coup is fully exposed. The second portion is a detailed attack on the fallacious claims and all but non-existent research that professors at universities such as Harvard, have used to claim the opposite of what is true about our children.

Sommers comes into her stride with a strong moral stand in the final two chapters, in which she comes down on the side of Aristotle, ‘as have most parents throughout history’, that children need to be morally educated. She clearly shows how the modern mind-wreckers, who are attacking our children’s very nature with our own tax dollars, are adherents to Rousseau’s philosophy of the nobility of the natural state. She gives some good accounts of teenage boy atrocities, from the East and Left Coast—to geographically bracket Columbine—that illustrate how the myth of the noble savage crumbles on contact with the actuality of the feral animal that such beliefs cultivate in modern societies.

This lady’s interviews with men who head all-boy classes in private schools and those few ghetto schools where they are permitted, is essentially a look back across 40,000 years of how men have traditionally forged boys; an ages old lesson that we have somehow collectively forgotten. As books for mainstream audiences are supposed to do, Christina Hoff Sommers holds out a hopeful fruit at the end. But just a few pages back, she has already detailed the death-grip that feminism has on American boys’ education, and the fact that it is essentially illegal, by rule of the Unites States Supreme Court, to educate boys apart from girls, by men, instead of in co-ed classes by women.

The author extends a hopeful rose from her pocket, but the plague is all around. We live in a society where it is against the law for men to teach boys in the competitive team-based context that facilitated our rise from the apes in one small corner of Africa to domination of the entire globe. It looks to me like we’re headed back to some fembot’s vision of Olduvai Gorge.