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Showing Original Post only (View all)"We Owe to Our Sons What We've Given Our Daughters" [View all]
{This might give you ants in your pants, but it's among Psychology Today's top 25 reads for February 2013}
Boys are not men; they are children, and they need our attention now.
Published on February 13, 2013 by Mark Sherman, Ph.D. in Real Men Don't Write Blogs
http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201302/top-25-list-february-2013/4-we-owe-our-sons-what-weve-given-our-daughters
Im on the mailing list for a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit called the Boys Initiative, for whom I edit a blog: Boys and Young Men: Attention Must Be Paid. On Sunday, February 3, my e-mails included a press alert from the CEO, Dennis Barbour, informing us that that days New York Times Sunday Review had a major article on why boys are falling behind. And yes, when I opened my copy of the Times, there it was. You really couldnt miss it. On the front page of that important section, with a graphic taking up more than half a page, was The Boys at the Back, by Christina Hoff Sommers.
The 1800-word piece started out discussing an important new study I had already heard about -- re boys grades in elementary school being negatively affected by their behavior -- and went on to mention data, very familiar to anyone concerned about this issue, showing the large gender gap in colleges, one which is particularly acute for minorities. Black women are nearly twice as likely to earn a college degree as black men, Sommers wrote. At some historically black colleges, the gap is astounding: Fisk is now 64 female; Howard, 67 percent; Clark Atlanta, 75 percent. The economist Andrew M. Sum and his colleagues at the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University examined the Boston Public Schools and found that for the graduating class of 2007, there were 191 black girls for every 100 boys going on to attend a four-year college or university. Among Hispanics, the ratio was 175 girls for every 100 boys; among whites, 153 for every 100.
I sent the link to this piece to friends, including one with whom I had lunch a couple of days later. He was shocked at those numbers, which shows, once again, that the problems of boys and young men are still, amazingly, barely on the national radar. But, as feminists told us back in the late 1960s, often the personal is political. My friend has two daughters and one granddaughter; I have three sons and three grandsons.
In 2000, Sommers wrote one of the first major books on the problems boys were having, but her relative conservatism about feminism got in the way of a widespread readership among liberals just those people who might make a real difference for boys. The book was titled The War Against Boys, and though her issues with feminism were evident in it, her data showing boys clearly falling behind girls in school and beyond was strong and should certainly have been convincing. Many feminists might not have cared for the messenger, but there was no question that the message was an important one.
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When it was the reverse, when men clearly outnumbered women in colleges, the womens movement looked at this and countless other areas in which women and girls were on the short end of things, and worked hard to change it. Why has the same thing not happened for our boys and young men?
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