The snow lay deep on Harvard Yard; it was still and white; it was perfect in its severe blankness, not unlike a newly prepared canvas awaiting the first touch of the artist’s brush. It was almost a provocation.
At about nine o’clock that evening, for reasons beyond our mortal comprehension, it pleased our bemused Deity to introduce into this uncorrupted scene His shock troops of the absurd: the Harvard crew team. They stumbled on stage filled with impudent free will. They had energy to spare. Their creative imaginations were well lubricated with alcohol.
Suddenly this band of brothers, none of whom had done anything artistic since elementary school, were seized with a collective desire to create a monument to their very own spiritual essence. The snow became their medium of necessity; their many hands moved as by a single will. By ten o’clock their work was done and they were well pleased. There it was, finally, thrusting upward into the night sky: an enormous snow phallus lovingly detailed with swelling veins, a urethral bulge and a ponderous scrotum. In their creative rapture the crewmen had captured the hopeful spirit of the throbbing love hammer. It was the sort of prideful, positive, towering gesture that would have warmed the heart of Gustav Eiffel. It was young manhood exuberantly flipping the bird to all the dark forces of the Universe. It was also obscene.
The phallus was erected on a Friday night. In the normal course of events the Harvard groundskeepers would have toppled the monster snow pecker on Monday but, as fate would have it, this monument to masculine hopefulness lasted a scant three hours. Someone assaulted and battered the defenseless penis sculpture to snow crumbs. In the wee hours of February 12th the one-story-tall snow phallus met the fate of a million bygone snowmen.
Now, almost anywhere else on our planet, the fall of the snow phallus would have gone unremarked, but this was modern America and this was Harvard.
At Harvard, where diplomas go for 160 grand a pop, giant snow dicks are symbolic, they are icons, and trashing one is interpreted as iconoclasm. Oh, God!
For a full week the “phallus breakers” as the Crimson called them, hid in silence. Then, on February 19th, Crimson editor Jonathan H. Esensten flushed the perp with a tongue-in-cheek opinion article called “The Broken Phallus of Harvard Yard.” Mr. Esensten proclaimed that “the destruction of the phallus was clearly a cowardly act of vandalism.” He wondered “why did the enormous phallus. . .elicit such iconoclastic fanaticism? And how could students who are normally so respectful of public art forms and self-expression react so violently to a harmless ice-covered phallus in their midst?” The editor went on: “Perhaps the phallus-breakers of Harvard Yard were reacting with bourgeois conventionality in labeling challenging art as subversive. Or maybe they were acting on some radical women’s liberation agenda that requires the destruction of visible symbols of male virility.
The phallus’ detractors might point to its large-size life-like features to label it not art, but an obscene symbol of male excess. The phallus might be threatening as a reminder of the subjugation of women by the hard-hearted, monolithic patriarchy. These objections are baseless. Although the builders of the snow phallus likely took pleasure in the sheer physical presence of the work, this pleasure does not invalidate the artistic merits of the sculpture. Moreover, public expressions such as the phallus should be debated, not destroyed. The next time a phallus goes up in the Yard, the phallus breakers should keep their hands off.”
On a campus where humorless ideologues abound, Mr. Esensten’s jokey opinion piece left many people feeling stressed and conflicted. Finally, the perpetrator could stand it no longer. Two days later, Amy Keel, Class of 2004, sent a letter to the editor wherein she unburdened her soul. She fessed up to “dismantling” the snow sculpture. Clearly, what Amy had done was proper because the sculpture was obscene and therefore it had no proper place on public display. That was Amy’s best defense. But poor Amy was so completely divorced from the work-a-day values of the rest of us that she could only sputter the formulaic blather of the extreme feminist Left. Amy argued in earnest that she was justified in trashing the phallus because it was put up “without permission” from the university. Because the university hadn’t granted a building permit for a gigantic snow penis, she just knew that she had been personally deputized to knock it down. Does Amy believe that this same standard applies to constructions by Harvard feminists? She doesn’t say.
Ms. Keel went on to reveal much more about the deep structure of her personal psychology by insisting that the snow pecker’s “only purpose could be to assert male dominance.” Huh? Women who talk like this usually fall into one of two groups: women who have only seen male human beings in photographs and women who have been deeply hurt by some jerk. Amy was quick to tell anyone who might offer her sympathy that she was a “rape survivor.” She offered no details. In an era when feminist theoreticians define all heterosexual intercourse as rape, we are left without any meaningful measure of Amy’s angst; we can only conclude that she met a jerk and she can’t move on. She’s stuck in her personal past.
Ms. Keel went on to expose even more of her ruined interior with comments such as: “no one should be subjected to an erect penis without his or her express permission or consent.” Permission? Does Amy carry pre-printed consent forms? This is the rigid legalistic world vision of an emotional cripple. Ms. Keel says some guys protested her frenzied assault on the snow penis; she characterized their objection as “gendered violence.” The discourse got dopier when Diane L. Rosenfeld, a lecturer in women’s studies, was quoted in the Crimson making the point that “women do not need to be reminded of the power of male genitalia.” She then compounded this silly misdemeanor by comparing the fallen snow johnson to the Washington Monument and “missiles.”
What makes these feminists so funny is the prodigious amount of earnest effort they expend getting to a place the rest of us get to in an instant simply by embracing traditional values. Instead of jabbering on about phallocentricity and symbolism and missiles, Amy could simply have said that the sculpture was indecent. It is only because she has rejected traditional values that she must grope for legalisms when confronted by obscenity. To Ms. Keel and her doctrinaire sidekicks a monster phallus in the middle of Harvard Yard was not, of itself, obscene; it was only objectionable because it belonged to a collection of symbols that suggested male domination to the feminist mind. The Harvard Women’s Center scrambled to offer “feminist perspectives” on the ice wang.
Modern feminism offers young women two mutually contradictory models of personal deportment: the first is the no-longer-repressed libertine; the second is a quivering, hyper-sensitive, neo-Victorian who is ever vigilant for any expression of male sexuality. Amy had chosen to play the role of the aggrieved, sensitive, feminist theoretician. The penis sculpture in Harvard Yard was bound to tweak someone like Amy Keel. She took the bait. She obligingly self-selected herself into the category of those folks who could never feel anything other than fear and resentment in the presence of the penis, never love. Confronting the snow penis was a moment of self revelation even if its public placement rendered it indecent. If the Harvard crew team had sculpted a nine-foot-high crucifix would Amy have attacked it as a symbol of suffocating patriarchy? Would she have justified her destructive impulses by saying that the university hadn’t given students permission to sculpt a nine-foot-high crucifix?
Amy Keel insists that “The unwanted image of an erect penis is an implied threat . . .it means that we, as women, must be subject to erect penises whether we like it or not.” In fact, the threat was inferred; Amy was telling us about herself. There is a Polynesian folk tale in which the hero overcomes his fear of a devouring vagina; he prevails by courageously extracting threatening teeth from the frightening vulva. This myth of primal fear is no more weird than the endless fear-infused metaphors that academic feminists toss about wherein penises are forever stabbing, piercing, invading, intruding and penetrating unhappy women. Would Amy Keel have been outraged by a big unauthorized and equally indecent snow vulva? Not a chance.
If Amy really found a snow wang threatening, not simply indecent, but threatening, then she needed a more cloistered environment than Harvard. Women’s Studies lecturer Diane Rosenfeld opined: “The ice sculpture was erected in a public space, one that should be free from menacing reminders of women’s sexual vulnerability.” The words “free from menacing reminders” means cloistered. She continued: “Women do not need to be reminded of the power of the symbol of the male genitalia.” So women should be shielded from “symbols,” lest their sensibilities be disturbed. Ms. Rosenfeld went on to say that the threatening snow penis lay in a long line of bothersome symbols which included missiles and the Washington Monument. The $160,000 tuition at Harvard is not too much to pay for deep thoughts like these.
Harvard’s crew captain, Michael J. Skey, said the team intended the giant johnson as a joke. “We built it for fun, instead of building a snowman. We built it specifically as a junior-high prank.” He hadn’t considered the effect it would have on the fevered minds of symbol-averse feminists. “If people find it obscene, they had a right to rip it down,” said the big-hearted Captain Skey. He added, “Smart kids overanalyze things.”
Amy Keel was having none of it: “These men felt that it was their right to build this pornographic sculpture whose only purpose could be to assert male dominance.” How sad. Life must be bleak for someone with so little imagination. It would never enter Amy’s head that such a thing might be an expression of sheer exuberance or adolescent impudence. Every time someone flips the bird they are flashing a small symbolic penis. Even women flash their finger-peckers in moments of anger. Perhaps even Amy has, at least once, signaled a robust “fuck you” with her middle finger. It seems to be a basic human urge.
Penises are all around us and they aren’t going away any time soon. To burden this bit of human anatomy with the dark symbolism of a swastika is to lose one’s grip on reality. Furthermore, society is not obliged to conform to Amy’s belief that male body parts have political meaning and are an “implied threat.” Amy now sees the world through the clouded prism of her own unhappy experience. Harvard professors like Diane Rosenfeld, who refer to the penis as a “menacing reminder of women’s sexual vulnerability” are not speeding Amy along the road to recovery.
The funniest part of the whole episode was the feminist response. After decades of brave talk about taking back their bodies and celebrating their sexuality and wresting their anatomy away from the patriarchy, these gals became emotionally unstrung by the glimpse of a snow dick! It existed for a scant three hours; it never saw the light of day, but that was all it took to set the hens to flapping and clucking. There was a fox in the hen house, Hannah bar the door! The snow dick touched their psyches with the force of a myth. Watching them lapse into victim mode was insightful. Their hyperventilating response to a cantankerous bit of bravado was comical. Their insistence that the big snow winkie was the moral equivalent of a flaming cross in a Mississippi corn field is just plain pathetic.
The Fury of the Feminists
As further evidence of God’s wry sense of humor, the clueless crewmen erected their phallic taunt smack in the center of America’s most notorious incubator of male-hostile feminism: Harvard University. Harvard is the home roost of Carol Gilligan, the matron saint of America’s “girls in crisis” movement. In 1995 this professor of gender studies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, together with a posse of her kindred spirits, kicked off a three-year study of boys called the Harvard Project on Women’s Psychology, Boys’ Development and the Culture of Manhood. Within a year Gilligan was proclaiming that her worst fears had been realized; she insisted that America’s boys were even more screwed up than its girls. Boys as young as three years of age were being traumatized by social pressures to “take into themselves the structure or moral order of patriarchal civilization – to internalize the patriarchal voice.”
To become “one of the boys,” insisted Gilligan, little Bobby was forced to hide all of his best qualities, the very qualities that made girls so pleasant to be around. In her opinion boys had become alienated from their very humanity. She found boys to be disturbingly aggressive and competitive and not at all the sort of creatures you could take to tea at Harvard. Gilligan says she only wants to help boys whom she believes are being ruined by “the patriarchal social order.” She says that “To be a real boy or man in such a culture means to be able to hurt without feeling hurt, to separate without feeling sadness or loss, and then to inflict hurt and separation on others.” (She left out the part about boiling puppies in oil.) Ms.Gilligan hints at her true agenda when she writes: “If boys in early childhood resist the break between the inner and outer worlds, they are resisting an initiation into masculinity or manhood as it is defined and established in cultures that value or valorize heroism, honor, war, competition – the culture of the warrior, the economy of capitalism.”
The self-appointed gender experts at Harvard believe that boys will remain a sexist menace until they are conditioned to reject conventional maleness; they have begun a campaign to rebuild boyhood in ways that will make boys less competitive and far more emotionally expressive; they echo Gloria Steinem who is convinced that “We badly need to raise boys more like we raise girls.” Oh, joy.
Gilligan and her fellow feminist utopians set about the business of deputizing America’s school teachers to Save the Males. They envisioned teachers in the government schools becoming amateur therapists dutifully rearranging the “gender schemas” of boys who exhibited suspiciously stereotypical male behavior. With the assistance of the U.S. Department of Education they would launch a movement that would quickly stigmatize and pathologize the male half of humanity.
It didn’t bother anyone in Washington that the “crisis” the feminists were fretting about was refuted by national surveys and was based on several false assumptions, among them the whopper that there are no inborn human proclivities, no fundamental human nature and no inborn differences between the sexes. At the Department of Education, Ms. Gilligan was considered an “expert” in matters of child psychology. Gilligan, after all, had kicked up a lot of dust in the education establishment with her “discovery” of how girls were suffering under patriarchy. No one at DOE seemed concerned that Gilligan’s sweeping accusations were based on one small study that other researchers could not reproduce. Studies by other sociologists found no crisis among America’s young people. After fifteen years and countless requests, Gilligan still refuses to let anyone examine the original data from her seminal study of girls. Her secrecy is most unusual. In any case, what mattered most to the keepers of the public purse was Gilligan’s ability to generate publicity for her ideologically driven “research.” Once the feminists had established the existence of a crisis as a matter of public opinion the Department of Education found it politically astute to fund the feminists with our tax dollars. A jobs program for feminist opinion shapers would give the appearance that the government was actually doing something useful.
The Harvard hit squad was quickly joined by all those groups that were already disposed to think the worst of all things masculine. The swelling ranks soon included the National Organization for Women, the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Ms. Foundation for Women, the Women’s Educational Equity Act Publishing Center, The American Association of University Women, the National Coalition for Sex Equity in Education, the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women and other folks with a pronounced anti-boy bias. Also included were a few self-professed male feminists, including William Pollack and Ronald Levant who co-authored A New Psychology of Men, in which they cheerfully assure us: “As we raise the next generation, the boys who will become men in the twenty-first century, we look forward to a time these boys will be able to safely stay in the ‘doll corner’ as long as they wish, without being taunted. . .” This gaggle of male-averse activists was destined by the laws of chemistry to make boys miserable. Things started badly and got steadily worse.
In 1996, Ms. Marie Wilson, president of the Ms. Foundation, was determined to discourage those women who were including their sons in Take Our Daughters to Work Day. In cahoots with feminist men’s groups, Ms. Wilson invented an alternative called Son’s Day. The inaugural Son’s Day was slated for October 20, 1996; there was great expectation among the ideologues. As the architects of Son’s Day cheerily explained, “October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, so there will be lots of activities scheduled.” Among the fun activities recommended for Son’s Day were: “Take your son - or ‘son for a day’ - to an event that focuses on . . .ending men’s violence against women. Call the Family Violence Prevention Fund at 800 END-ABUSE for information.”
If that wasn’t enough fun, there was this helpful suggestion: “Since Son’s Day is on SUNDAY, make sure your son is involved in preparing the family for the work week ahead. This means: helping lay out clothes for siblings [and] making lunches.”
And: “Take your son grocery shopping. . .”
Wow! Those fun-loving feminists really know how to make that special Sunday a memorable boy’s holiday: grocery shopping, laying out clothes and dwelling on male violence against women. Feminists must really have that deep female empathy for which they keep congratulating themselves.
To the feminists’ way of thinking most of what is wrong with society can be traced back to male aggression. Boys are imagined to be ambulatory vessels of toxic sexism; their very maleness provokes radical feminists to agitate for harsh remedial reeducation programs. Nan Stein, a director at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women accuses little boys who chase girls on the playground and flip their skirts of committing acts of “gendered terrorism.” When teachers take this diamond-hard tone, is it any wonder that students like Amy Keel wax hyperbolic at the sight of a frozen phallus in Harvard Yard?
Then there is Katherine Hanson, director of the Women’s Educational Equity Act Publishing Center, who is so determined to slander America’s men folk that she simply invents preposterous anti-male statistics to bolster her arguments for a radical social agenda. Here are a few choice Hansonisms:
Every year nearly four million women are beaten to death.
Violence is the leading cause of death among women.
The leading cause of injury among women is being beaten by a man at home.
There was a 59 percent increase in rapes between 1990 and 1991.
It’s all crap. Katherine Hanson invented these bogus statistics in an effort to convince the gullible that America is a savage patriarchy, what Hanson calls a “culture of violence” which, she insists, springs “from cultural norms that socialize males to be aggressive, powerful, unemotional, and controlling.”
Ours is the most self-critical and quantified society in history; some of our best-attended statistics are those relating to health and crime. So let’s take a moment to examine the facts according to Katherine Hanson, feminist expert.
Hanson would have us believe that 4 million women are beaten to death in America every 365 days. That’s 11,000 American women battered to death every 24 hours. At that rate the entire female population of America (about 140 million) would be beaten to death in only 35 years. In truth, her 4 million figure is four times bigger than all annual female deaths from all causes combined. Only a tiny number of the one million women who die each year are victims of violence and even fewer are battered to death. The FBI puts the total number of women murdered in 1996 at 3,631. Even fewer were beaten to death. Hanson’s phony crime statistic, which is dutifully repeated by math-challenged feminists everywhere, is only off by about, well . . .four million.
Hanson claims that violence is the leading cause of women’s deaths in America. She’s wrong, the leading cause of death for women is heart disease which kills about 370,000 women each year, followed by cancer which kills about a quarter million women each year. Deaths by homicide, about 3,600, are far fewer than the number of women who kill themselves (about 6,000).
What of Hanson’s bold assertion that the leading cause of injury to women is being beaten by a man in the home? According to an emergency room study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one percent of women’s injuries are caused by male partners. Even allowing for those women who lie about the cause of their injuries, Hanson’s bogus claim remains a grotesque slander. Hanson’s claim that rape increased by 59 percent in the year 1990-91 is also preposterous. It increased by 4 percent according to FBI statistics.
Lies, distortions and crude stereotyping are the mother’s milk of radical feminism. As every streetwise demagogue knows, nothing will hold the faithful together better than being able to focus the flock’s hostility on an overblown Satan figure. For the fulminating feminists the Great Satan is patriarchy and the Great Satan’s army of demonic imps are the frolicking, boisterous, masculine little boys of America. If only it were possible to neutralize this army, to neuter it, to render it impotent by employing a carefully administered program of social conditioning, by a campaign of early intervention that would de-masculinize and then feminize America’s boy children, then it would be possible to realize the feminist Utopia. This campaign is now well under way in the government schools; it has received the blessing of the Department of Education; it is lavishly funded with our tax dollars.
Should Katherine Hanson and her kindred spirits be permitted to subject millions of normal boys to her program of guided feminization? Should she be taxpayer funded? Should ideologues so oblivious to facts and common sense be allowed to define an entire gender as pathological?
In 1999, Nan Stein and her associates at the Wellesley Center published Gender Violence/Gender Justice as a teaching guide for grades seven to twelve. It was intended for use in English and social studies classes. Its opening line reads: “Schools may well be the training grounds for domestic violence through the practice and permission given to the public performance of sexual harassment.” This is the same Nan Stein who calls elementary-school boys who chase girls in the schoolyard “perpetrators.” Nan’s report had the full support of the Department of Education and it’s a classic example of bureaucratic “gender think.” Its lesson plans are meant to awaken boys to the countless ways in which they make girls miserable, while simultaneously awakening girls to the horrors of America’s misogynistic girl-destroying patriarchy. For the boys it’s a foretaste of the consciousness-raising exercises that Nan Stein is certain many of them will be receiving later as convicted sex criminals. Here’s a sample lesson for seventh graders: “Ask the students to close their eyes . . .Once they’ve closed their eyes, say ‘Imagine that the woman you care about most (your mother, sister, daughter, girlfriend) is being raped, battered or sexually abused. . .’ Give them at least 30 seconds to think about the scenario before asking them to open their eyes.” The teacher then directs her captive charges to write down their feelings. Nan Stein recommends that the teacher make crystal clear to her students that “We need to understand how boys and men are learning to equate violent behavior with ‘manhood’ in order to de-link the concepts.” And you thought your kids were learning English in English class.
Since the resurgence of feminism in 1970, many of America’s brightest women have chosen careers in business; this has left the ranks of the teachers’ unions intellectually diminished. In 1998 a whopping 59 percent of prospective teachers in Massachusetts flunked a basic competency test that the average tenth-grader is expected to pass. These are the folks who have been chosen to administer therapy in the classroom to your children. Are the teachers doing such a wonderful job teaching that they can spare class time for sensitivity training and gender reconstruction? Should they be telling their captive audience that boys “learn violent behavior with manhood,” and are proto-harassers and latent girl abusers? What normal boy wouldn’t be demoralized by such an anti-boy climate?
In 1996 six-year-old Jonathan Prevette kissed a female classmate on the cheek and was instantly branded as a sexual harasser by the enforcers of the new feminist order. In Worchester, Massachusetts a mother who arrived at her son’s school to pick him up was told that he had been reprimanded and punished for having hugged another child. The mother was warned by a guardian of feminist virtue that: “He’s a toucher. We are not going to put up with it!” The boy was three years old.
American school boys now live under a cloud of suspicion. They are continually attacked for who they are; they are blamed for history. The feminist gospel of male sinfulness is preached in countless classrooms. When Nan Stein did a national survey of domestic violence and sexual assault experts, she asked them what they liked the least about the materials they used when making presentations in schools. The most common complaint was that “males are never positively portrayed.” What did the presenters expect? The academic feminists who create the videos, handouts and guides for these presentations see no virtue whatever in masculinity; they fear it and they resent it; the precincts of women’s studies programs are their refuge from all things masculine. They seem to be possessed by a sort of male-directed autism, an inability to connect emotionally with normal boys or men.
In truth, males are more aggressive than females, a difference that manifests itself as early as two years of age. Little boys are boldly competitive and physical; they may pursue, confront, insult and strike out at one another. As they mature they strive for excellence, they compete with others, they achieve; they assert their masculinity in ways both physical and intellectual. The hallmark of their evolving maturity is self-restraint, an ever increasing self-discipline, a channeling of their volatile powers into creative and socially acceptable endeavors. If a little boy is like a kettle on a campfire, then a mature man is like a steam engine; the same energy keeps things boiling within, but the energy of the man is better directed and socially useful. The self-restraint that is the badge of male maturity is usually modeled for the boy by his father. In the absence of a father, a boy’s likelihood of going astray, even to the point of criminality, is greatly increased. The boys who have been shaped by feminine forces are all too easy to spot (think: fatherless Bill Clinton). A wise mother is always a blessing, but even the best-intentioned woman cannot communicate to a boy the essence of masculine virtue; her best efforts will always fall short, like someone who has been deaf from birth laboring to recite the Gettysburg Address. In any case, the overwhelming majority of American young men do not abuse women and are not destined to become criminals.
Unhappily, the school of radical gender feminism makes the mistake of seeing in the rambunctious play of boys the early manifestations of latent criminality; they believe that masculinity itself is the wellspring of violence. This false premise now holds sway at the women’s institutes, the U.S. Department of Education and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
In a joint lecture in 1996, Harvard’s Carol Gilligan and her associate Elizabeth Debold expounded on their belief that the rough and tumble play of boys, together with their competitive behavior, is entirely the result of their social conditioning. To these women, masculine deportment is merely a cultural artifact and is therefore susceptible to reconstruction through education. Debold remarked: “Children don’t start knowing what boys and girls are . . .it takes time to learn that boy/girl is a category.” It is a first principle among the radical gender feminists that all humans are essentially androgynous and that masculinity is nothing more than a constellation of learned biases and behaviors. Feminist Sandra Lee Bartky tells us rather grimly that all humans are born “bisexual” and then are transformed by our patriarchal society “into male and female gender personalities, the one destined to command, the other to obey.” To anyone who has spent time in the company of children such feminist theorizing is flaming nonsense. It also flies in the face of ever-mounting evidence from modern genetics, neuroscience, neuroendocrinology and evolutionary psychology. Nonetheless, the feminists are on a tear.
After Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold chose Hitler’s birthday to open fire on their Columbine classmates, the feminists were eager to place them in the same category with all of America’s normal sons, thereby blurring the distinction between healthy boys and sociopaths. In 1998 William Pollack, director of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital and the author of Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood, told Newsweek that “Boys are in silent crisis. The only time we notice is when they pull the trigger.” Pollack told People that boys who slaughter their classmates are only “the tip of the iceberg, the extreme end of a large crisis.” Pollack further stigmatized an entire sex on the Today show (7/15/98) when he ventured: “In addition to the national crisis, the boys who pick up guns, the boys who are suicidal and homicidal, the boys next door or the boy living in the room next door is also, I have found in my research, isolated, feeling lonely, can’t express his feelings. And that happens because of the way we bring boys up.” Pollack’s seamless transition from “boys who pick up guns” to “the boys next door” created needless fear and suspicion. All the best evidence indicates that Pollack’s “tip of the iceberg” alarmism is pure rubbish.
During a Saturday Today interview Pollack was asked by a father if he should explain to his eleven-year-old son that an inclination toward homicide was part of his male constitution. Pollack replied: “I think we should do that with eleven-year-old boys. I think we should start with two- and three- and four- and five-year-old boys and not push them . . .from their mothers.”
This is nuts! America’s typical child killer is female. Experience has taught us to expect about 1,300 child murders this year; over 900 of those murders will be committed by the child’s mother, but does anyone suggest sitting every eleven-year-old girl down and explaining to her that she has the potential for infanticide? Black folks, as a group, have a pretty high crime rate. Should they be lectured about their innate potential for criminality? Of course not! Most people are not criminals and they shouldn’t be treated like criminals, or even like potential criminals. Casting suspicion over entire groups or an entire sex is a rotten thing to do. The feminists who treat boys like proto-killers and proto-rapists are simply behaving badly. They are gender bigots.
The Columbine killers were admirers of Adolf Hitler. The Jonesboro, Arkansas killers belonged to a satanic cult. Kip Kinkle, who killed his parents and then had a go at his Oregon classmates, was fond of setting fires and torturing animals. By any measure, these guys were freaks; no useful purpose is served by placing then on a continuum with normal boys and then blurring the distinction between them. If masculinity breeds violence, then why are less than one half of one percent of males under eighteen years of age arrested for a violent crime in any given year? Pollack’s iceberg looks more like an ice cube upon closer inspection; he’s just another shrill alarmist trying to make a name for himself in the education establishment.
Feminist Susan Faludi plays the same crooked game. Susan wrote a piece of trash called Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Male in which she claimed to have discovered a “masculinity crisis” among American men. Men, she says, are suffering because our patriarchal culture burdens men with crippling myths about manliness. As evidence she offers numerous interviews with unhappy wife beaters, some male pornography stars and a gang of sex criminals called the Spur Posse. We are left to assume that Jeffery Dahmer, the gay cannibal killer, was unavailable for an interview. Faludi’s carefully selected collection of male misfits gives us ample reason to believe that she has stacked the deck. Her book is a “hot read” in feminist circles, but cooler heads tell us not to panic. The National Opinion Research Center has been taking the emotional temperature of Americans since 1957. In all that time about 90 percent of all respondents have said that they are happy with their lives. Men are not in crisis; their masculinity does not hang like a millstone around their necks.
Upon closer inspection much of modern feminist scholarship is revealed to be little more than a body of fashionable resentments, an exercise in schoolmarmish tongue-wagging; the facts count for nothing. In feminist texts, the most depraved sociopaths are made instant metaphors for the boy next door; the legion of honorable young men is ignored. Divisive boy-hating activists now rule the academy; they have moved a toxic doctrine that equates masculinity with violence into the mainstream; they want to screw around with our sons’ “gender schemas.” Feminists have declared the masculinity of American boys to be politically incorrect.
Harvard is a preeminent incubator of this sort of unwholesome idiocy and it was in Harvard Yard that the cocky crewmen erected the joyful frozen johnson that inspired so many fuming feminist workshops. In the days that followed Amy Keel’s admission that she had toppled the indecent sculpture, it was revealed that Amy had an accomplice: her roommate, Mary Cardinale. Mary was a writer for the campus conservative publication. While Amy took offense because the sculpture belonged to a category of symbols that suggested male domination, Mary simply remained in touch with her traditional values. While Amy was spinning baroque feminist perspectives, Mary went straight to the heart of the matter: she asked herself what Jesus would do. After that, the impudent sculpture was a goner.
Thomas Clough
Copyright 2003
3/25/03
Recommended reading: The War Against Boys by Christina Hoff Sommers (Simon & Schuster)