Manliness

What can happen when you leave your little boy alone in the bath room.

I’m not sure about the authenticity of the above picture. After all, another little boy was entered into the Apricot festival’s Little Mr. Apricot contest by his mother. Mothers seem capable of anything! Appropriately, for a boy, the newly-crowned, 4-year old Matthew Burgos raised his middle finger to the crowd! What a man! Little Matthew lost his title of Little Mr. Apricot for making the obscene gesture at the crowd watching the pageant in Patterson, Calif. The town is still abuzz.

Dennis Prager talked about the The War Against Boys, a recent book by Christina Hoff Sommers. He believes, and I believe, that manliness is being squished out of little boys in schools and in society. Sommers is appalled at the educational establishment's efforts to moderate boys' aggressiveness and other elements of their masculine nature. Dennis tells of his little boy tackling his friends when they came into the Prager house. Hi Jimmy, tumble, rumble…. gotcha ….give up? My John did the same thing, it’s what boys do. But grammar school teachers will have none of it. No dodge-ball either.

There are consequences. In a report written for the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, Sara Mead notes that vast numbers of boys are doing poorly in school; more boys than girls drop out; girls have higher aspirations and take more rigorous academic programs; and that the number of boys diagnosed with disabilities has exploded in the past 30 years.

From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated.

I believe, with Prager and Sommers, that what is being seen as a boy problem is actually maleness itself, with the noisy, energetic antsiness and high jinks of young boys now redefined as a behavior problem by teachers who do not know how to handle them.

The end results are horrible. Reading scores of 17-year-old boys have gone down in the past decade, hitting an all-time low in 2004. Our colleges are now 57% female. For every 100 women who earn a bachelor's degree, just 73 men get one.

The gender differences are not uniform. In the highest-income families, men attend college as much as women, according to the American Council on Education. But young men from low-income families are the least represented on campus, and the gender gap has been widening, especially among low-income whites and Hispanics.

Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor has created the Boys Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles.

Hoff Sommers notes that we are strikingly better at educating young women than young men. Boys need our attention.

In a recent book called Manliness, Harvey Mansfield, Professor of Government at Harvard University, presents the first comprehensive study of manliness, a quality both good and bad, mostly male, often intolerant, irrational, and ambitious. Our gender-neutral society does not like it but cannot get rid of it.

Manly men in their assertiveness raise issues, bring them to the fore, and make them public and political, they prefer times of war, conflict, and risk, and bring change or restores order at crucial moments.

Manly men are needed in times of danger and at times of business. Let’s be careful not to stomp out manliness.