It is a bad time to be a boy in America. As the new millennium began, the defining event for American girls was the triumph of the U.S. womens soccer team. For boys, the major event was the mass killing at Columbine High School. It would seem that boys in our society face great difficulties and risks as they grow up. Yet the best-known studies and the academic experts are telling us that it is girls who are suffering from a decline in self-esteem. The experts say that it is girls who need extra help with academics and elsewhere in a society that favors boys. Christina Hoff Sommers, a Ph.D. in philosophy and a former professor of philosophy at Clark University, disagrees with the increasingly popular feminist views. Sommers believes that it is boys who are being "shortchanged" in a society that is rapidly becoming overrun with feminist views. There is no girl crisis, says Sommers. Girls are not being pushed aside, "shortchanged," or repressed in American society argues Sommers. Girls are outperforming boys academically, and girls self-esteem is no different from boys. Sommers believes that it is boys who are lagging far behind girls and Sommers attempts to prove this in her book: The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming our Young Men.Sommers argues three main points in this book. First, boys encounter more difficulties growing up in America today and being successful in schools and colleges, than do girls. More boys than girls are involved in crime, alcohol, and drugs. Girls attempt suicide more often than boys, but boys actually kill themselves more often. In a typical year (1997), there were 4,493 suicides of young people between the ages of five and twenty-four: 701 females, 3,792 males (Sommers 26). Research shows that boys, not girls, are on the weak side of an educational gender gap. Boys, on average, are a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing; they are less committed to school and less...
