The most recent issue of Gender and Society, the top sociology of gender journal, has and article by Paula England and Su Li¹that examines trends in gender segregation of college majors. On a positive note, the study indicates that during the overall time period gender segregation decreased dramatically, but the study also found that the pace of gender desegregation stalled in the later years of the study (It covers 1971-2001).

The data the authors’ use points to the “devaluation of the feminine” argument. This argument posits that the pace of desegregation is driven by women entering male fields; however, men do not reciprocate by entering females fields since these fields are considered a “step down.” Thus, the process of change is asymmetrical–women are changing dramatically and men are not changing much.

The authors summarize their findings in this way:

Baccalaureate degree recipients have gone from 44 to 58 percent women from 1971 to 2002. Women’s representation increased most rapidly in the first decade. Indeed, although the fact that women are getting more college degrees than men has just recently surfaced in the popular press, women’s numbers passed men’s in 1982 and have remained higher ever since. During these three decades, the gender segregation of fields of undergraduate study has declined, but the largest decline was in the first half of the period. During that period, successive cohorts of women changed their field choices quite dramatically toward fields dominated by men—out of fields dominated by women such as education and English and especially into business-related fields. Virtually none of the desegregation came from more men choosing fields traditional for women in significantly greater numbers. In the latter half of the period, women’s probabilities of choosing the historically male-dominated majors failed to continue their upward trek, and their probabilities of choosing fields traditional for women (such as English and elementary education), which had been falling, stopped their fall. This is a large part of why desegregation has stalled. Desegregation was also stalled by the fact that, as fields feminized, men eschewed the fields, especially in the more recent period, as our regression results show. Whether this still-somewhat-segregated equilibrium is temporary or will hold for the long term remains to be seen.

Our interpretation of these patterns draws on two theoretical perspectives with implications for change. The devaluation perspective helps us to understand why gender-related change is deeply asymmetric. While desegregation could come from women’s abandoning predominantly female for predominantly male fields or from men’s abandoning predominantly male for predominantly female fields, almost all the change was of the former type. We believe that this is because any field associated with women has been culturally devalued, so that women have more to gain than men in status and rewards from majoring in fields nontraditional for their gender. Devaluation also explains our regression-based findings that feminization of fields deters men from entering.

The authors also say that this trend is consistent with other trends in gender inequality in recent years. Over the 1990s the indicators of gender inequality such as the pay gap, occupational segregation, and egalitarian attitudes have not changed much. (The authors cite a study by Cotter, Hermsen and Vanneman.)² for the pay gap and occupational segregation. I have a feeling the the 1990s and 2000s are going to be for gender what the 1970s and 1980s were for race–the point at which major progress towards ending inequality stalls. Of course, this is just me speculating.

On of the things that this study suggests is that after a certain point, gender desegregation is really contingent on men’s choices and behaviors. This also leads me to wonder what we can do to get more men to enter fields like nursing or education, since women have been entering fields like engineering and physics in larger numbers.

1. England, Paula and Su Li. 2006. “Desegregation Stalled.” Gender and Society 20(5):657-677. (back)
2. Cotter, David A., Joan M. Hermsen, and Reeve Vanneman. 2004. Gender inequality at work. New York: Russell Sage. (back)

Via Dylan at Handle The Truth, a fantastic article by one of my favorite writers, Michael Kimmel, regarding the so-called “Boy Crisis” in education.

After outlining the case for the Boy Crisis, Kimmel effectively goes over the reasons for doubting the “crisis” exists: That historically, panics over boys in crisis surface again and again (and women - whether in the form of female schoolteachers or of feminists - are always to blame); that wage gaps would lead us to expect boys to have less incentive to stay in school (someone who can earn $20,000 a year out of high school is a good deal more likely to drop out than someone who can earn $14,000);¹ how “No Child Left Behind” has hurt boys who would benefit from gym and sports programs, and from counseling; and that far from being a universal among boys, the “boy crisis” is virtually all among boys from lower-income families and boys of color. Kimmell writes:

Why don’t the critics acknowledge these race and class differences? To many who now propose to “rescue” boys, such differences are incidental because, in their eyes, all boys are the same aggressive, competitive, rambunctious little devils. They operate from a facile, and inaccurate, essentialist dichotomy between males and females. Boys must be allowed to be boys—so that they grow up to be men.

This facile biologism leads the critics to propose some distasteful remedies to allow these testosterone-juiced boys to express themselves. Gurian, for example, celebrates all masculine rites of passage, “like military boot camp, fraternity hazings, graduation day, and bar mitzvah” as “essential parts of every boy’s life.” He also suggests reviving corporal punishment, both at home and at school…

I was one of the boys who failed all the “masculinity” tests; I was gentle, overly sensitive, and could no more catch a ball than I could catch a jumbo jet plane. I can’t imagine how I would have survived the kind of schooling Gurian wants to shove boys into. But because wimpy boys don’t fit into the biological-essentialist worldview, their needs are never considered by the boy-crisis mavens. Their allegedly “pro-boy” reforms are really only about helping the jocky boys; all other boys can go hang.²

A crisis among lower-income and non-white boys is still a crisis, of course.³ But to talk as if an inability to do well in contemporary schools comes with the Y chromosome is deceptive. There already are many schools in the USA, right now, in which boys do just as well as girls. Boy crisis mavens tend to talk about how boy brains can’t learn if they’re expected to sit still in class, to read novels, to do homework, and to follow rules; but in schools where boys excel, boys are expected to do all those things.

Nonetheless, it’s a fact that among some groups, boys are doing worse than girls. Why is this? Kimmel argues that a false and damaging conception of masculinity harms boys by dissuading them from putting as much effort as they should into their schoolwork, even as it encourages them to be overconfident about their abilities.

Kimmel has angry words for the anti-male ideology underlying the “boy crisis” panic:

It is not the school experience that “feminizes” boys, but rather the ideology of traditional masculinity that keeps boys from wanting to succeed. “The work you do here is girls’ work,” one boy commented to a researcher. “It’s not real work.”

“Real work” involves a confrontation — not with feminist women, whose sensible educational reforms have opened countless doors to women while closing off none to men — but with an anachronistic definition of masculinity that stresses many of its vices (anti-intellectualism, entitlement, arrogance, and aggression) but few of its virtues. When the self-appointed rescuers demand that we accept boys’ “hardwiring,” could they possibly have such a monochromatic and relentlessly negative view of male biology? Maybe they do. But simply shrugging our collective shoulders in resignation and saying “boys will be boys” sets the bar much too low. Boys can do better than that. They can be men.

Perhaps the real “male bashers” are those who promise to rescue boys from the clutches of feminists. Are males not also “hardwired” toward compassion, nurturing, and love? If not, would we allow males to be parents? It is never a biological question of whether we are “hardwired” for some behavior; it is, rather, a political question of which “hardwiring” we choose to respect and which we choose to challenge.

The antifeminist pundits have an unyielding view of men as irredeemably awful. We men, they tell us, are savage, lustful, violent, sexually omnivorous, rapacious, predatory animals, who will rape, murder, pillage, and leave towels on the bathroom floor—unless women fulfill their biological duty and constrain us. “Every society must be wary of the unattached male, for he is universally the cause of numerous ills,” writes David Popenoe. Young males, says Charles Murray, are “essentially barbarians for whom marriage . . . is an indispensable civilizing force.”

By contrast, feminists believe that men are better than that, that boys can be raised to be competent and compassionate, ambitious and attentive, and that men are fully capable of love, care, and nurturance. It’s feminists who are really “pro-boy” and “pro-father”—who want young boys and their fathers to expand the definition of masculinity and to become fully human.

I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

1. Actually, Kimmel barely touches on the point about the wage gap, but it’s a hobby horse of mine so I’m including it on this list. (back)
2. And even the “help” offered jock boys is dubious; such “help” could be accurately termed “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” (back)
3. Let’s not forget, however, that the same crisis exists among lower-income and non-white girls, whose academic achievement is considerably lower than that of their middle-class white counterparts. The real crisis owes much more to class and race inequalities than to sex. (back)

Asher from Dreams Into Lighting emailed me this article, from the Hartford Courant:

While black, Hispanic and low-income children again lagged far behind others on statewide mastery test scores, another group of students also remained mired in a chronic - though often less noticed - achievement gap.

Boys continued to trail girls by substantial margins in reading and writing on the annual Connecticut Mastery Test. The pattern has persisted since Connecticut first started keeping track of scores by gender in 2000, and is consistent with longstanding patterns on national tests. [...]

In writing, “Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds,” Kleinfeld wrote in a recent paper for the White House Conference on Helping America’s Youth. [...]

“It’s a huge problem,” Kleinfeld said. The literacy gap between girls and boys “has been very large since the beginning of time,” she said. “Think back to Tom Sawyer and Becky.”

So wait, which is it - are boys currently falling behind, or has it always been this way?

Also, as I’ll show below, the evidence from the Connecticut Mastery Test shows that the boy crisis does not exist among “boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group.” On the contrary, the results are consistent with my belief that without racism and poverty holding them back, boys do just as well as girls.

Most boys develop verbal skills later than girls do and may not be ready for the intensive reading instruction that some schools are now demanding as early as kindergarten, she said.

For boys who lag, she said, one strategy would be to “keep them in kindergarten for two years, or keep them out of school until they’re ready.”

In addition, Kleinfeld and others say, boys’ reading habits are geared more toward non-fiction - subjects such as sports or adventure - while girls often prefer novels and short stories.

Three points:

1) Notice, once again, the boyhood-as-disability theme, which is common in “boy crisis” writings. This expert actually suggests that boys should be kept back a year or two - which means, except for those boys who manage to skip ahead at some point, boys wouldn’t graduate high school until they’re 19 or 20. That’s a pretty radical proposal. Has anyone considered that if boys have to wait until the age of 20 to graduate, the result might be more boys dropping out before graduation?

2) I don’t know what data Kleinfeld is using (and I doubt her work for the White House Conference on Helping America’s Youth was put through a rigourous peer-review process). But this is an article about the results from the Connecticut Mastery Test, and it’s not true that Connecticut Mastery Test found that “Boys of every ethnic and socioeconomic group are falling far behind girls of similar backgrounds.”

At this website, you can look at the Connecticut Mastery Test results for boys and girls from different towns. (To keep things simple for myself, I’m just going to report the results for 8th graders, but as far as I could tell by spot-checking things are similar at every grade level).

Let’s first check out Bridgeport, a town in which few families have much money, and the majority of students are either hispanic or black (or both). In Bridgeport, 45% of boys and 46% of girls are proficient in math, a basically identical result. But for reading, 45% of boys and 53% of girls are proficient. And in writing, 55% of boys and 75% of girls are proficient - a 20% difference. That’s pretty huge.

Poking around the site further, I can see that 88% of eighth graders in Bridgeport are black or hispanic, and 97% are poor enough to qualify for the discount lunch program.

Now let’s look at the results from Westport, a town in which 94% of eighth graders (or, at least, of eighth graders who took the Connecticut Mastery Test) are white, and less than 3% qualified for the discount lunch program.

In Westport, 97% of both boys and girls are proficient in math, 96% of boys and 97% of girls are proficient in reading, and 97% of boys and 99% of girls are proficient in writing. There is effectively no difference between Westport’s boys and girls, according to the Connecticut Mastery Test.

As it happened, I spent my 8th grade attending public school in Westport.¹ All the boys read fiction (we read To Kill A Mockingbird that year, I think), and I can’t imagine that has changed - because I think Westport parents would scream bloody murder if the schools tried to shortchange their boys’ education that way. What the “boy crisis” mavens are proposing would not only fail to help boys, it would deprive them of an education in literature.

3) As I wrote in an earlier post, it’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. But it’s not a “boy crisis,” and there’s nothing deficient in boy’s brains that makes them biologically incapable of doing as well as girls, or of reading fiction.

There are way too many boys from indian, black, hispanic and low-income families who are not benefiting enough from school, and whose future is needlessly dim; it’s a tragedy for those boys and for our entire society if things keep going the way they’ve been. I wish I had the solution, but I don’t. Nonetheless, wrong analysis leads to wrong solutions. The people who are focusing on nonexistent inherent deficiencies in how boys learn, and pretty much ignoring class and race, are coming up with solutions that will be expensive and unhelpful at best, and actually harmful to boys at worst.

4. Finally, as big as the 20% difference in reading achievement between Bridgeport boys and girls is, let’s not overlook the much larger differences in achievement between children in Bridgeport and children in Westport. That’s the real crisis, and that should be our main focus.

[Crossposted on Creative Destruction, a dark and forbidding place avoided by wise hobbits.]

1. Yes, I admit it, I grew up in Westport. The shame will follow me forever. (back)

So one of the readers over at my blog (Sammy) sent me a link to a year long series in the Washington Post about the status of Black men. Here’s the quote from the first two paragraphs:

“What does it mean to be a black man? Imagine three African American boys, kindergartners who are largely alike in intelligence, talent and character, whose potential seems limitless. According to a wealth of statistics and academic studies, in just over a decade one of the boys is likely to be locked up or headed to prison. The second boy — if he hasn’t already dropped out — will seriously weigh leaving high school and be pointed toward an uncertain future. The third boy will be speeding toward success by most measures.

Being a black man in America can mean inhabiting a border area between possibility and peril, to feel connected to, defined by, even responsible for each of those boys — and for other black men. In dozens of interviews, black men described their shared existence, of sometimes wondering whether their accomplishments will be treated as anomalies, their individuality obscured by the narrow images that linger in the minds of others.”

Overall, the introductory article is good. There are a few statistics that are either misinterpreted or wrong, but for the most part the article reflects what I think are the common views on the “problems, perils, and prospects” of Black men. I am admittedly leery of some of the save the Black man rhetoric because, even though it is well intentioned, some of it can be very patriarchal. I don’t think that the first article in this series falls into that trap. The only trap it falls into is the trap of talking about Black men as if they live in a vacuum. To talk about Black men as if they have a a completely autonomous existence from Black women and the larger society misses the point. That sort of framing makes it look like Black men just develop themselves without any outside influence from other race/gender groups. I don’t want to be too harsh though because this is just the first in a very long series, and there are a few places in the article where the author does talk about some of the social forces impacting Black men.

What I would like to do with your help (You gotta let me know when these article come out, as I don’t have Washington Post access.) is take on a particular problem or issue related to the articles. In other words, I’ll let you know what the statistics say, and what sociologists say. (I suspect my guest posting time at Alas will be over by the time these articles come out, so you’ll have to get over to my blog to check out the other entries.)

Here are a few of the topics I expect the Washington post Series to take on: Murder, Imprisonment, Unemployment, Single Parent Homes, Poverty, HIV, Life Expectancy, Parenting, and Pop Culture Images. Even if they do not take on these issues, I will because these are definitely some of the problem areas for some Black men. I am also going to compare Black men to other race gender groups so you can get a sense of how the data compares.

I’m going to go ahead today and start with Black men and graduation/drop out rates.

Before we can talk about Back men and their graduation rates, it is important to place this in a larger context. The graph above looks at racial variations in high school and college graduation. (Asians, who are not included in these charts have a slightly higher graduate rate than Whites, and I could not fin data on American Indians.). The good news is that the drop out rate for Blacks has fallen over the past 30 years and the graduation rate has increased. Here are two charts depicting these trends. Even though the trends are good, the gap stopped closing in the mid 1990s and persists today.

So What About Black Men?

Black Male Primary and Secondary School Performance

The data presented above is disaggregated by race but not by gender and race simultaneously. So what happens if we look at Black males compared to other race gender groups: how are they fairing in school? In 2001 the National Center For Education Statistics Released this report, which details school performance by race and gender. This report compares boys and girls throughout the educational process.

Although my primary focus here is on drop out and graduation rates, I thought it would be useful to include a discussion of a few other issues related to educational achievement. On most measures of early development, Black males and females are relatively similar, and on most measures Black students tend to perform better than Latinos and worse than Whites (Reports for Asians and American Indians are not included). One area where Black boys fair poorly is in their likelihood of repeating a grade. 12.2% of Black boys ages 5-12 had repeated a grade (a higher rate than any other race gender group). This compares to 10.8% of Hispanic boys, 7.1% of Black girls, 6.9% of White boys, 6.7% of Hispanic girls, and 4.4% of White girls. When it came to fighting at school or carrying weapons, Black boys were also considerably more like than any other race/gender group to report doing this, but they were significantly less likely to use alcohol, cigarettes, or marijuana than their male counterparts. They were also less likely to be offered, sold, or given an illegal drug than their male counterparts (but more likely than their female counterparts). In fact, the only race/gender group less likely to use cigarettes or alcohol are Black girls.

The drop out statistics show Black men to be somewhere in the middle of the pack. 13% of Black males 16-24 had dropped out of high school, compared to 31.6% of Hispanic males, 22% of Hispanic females, 9% of Black females, 7.9% of White males, and 6.7% of White females. So when it comes to high school completion rates. Black males are not at the top of the pack, and they are not at the bottom.

The most dramatic problem facing Black men, when it comes to education, is in the areas of college enrollment and completion. When it comes to college enrollment, the gap between Black men and other groups is sizable. In a 2004 issue of the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education sociologist Obie Clayton argues that the low enrollment of Black men in college can be directly related to how Black males are treated earlier in their educational careers. He cites several major areas of concern:

1)The type of academic and career counseling Black males receive in high school. 2) The expectations high school teachers, counselors, parents and other adults have of them. 3)Lack of exposure to college-preparatory curriculum. 4)The preparation of their teachers. 5) Their family’s financial standing. 6) Their self-identity and overall attitude toward education and scholarship. 7) Their assessment of jobs and pay available with a high school degree or less, in comparison to a college degree.

My own assessment would be that on some of these issues, 4&5 in particular, Black males and females would not be differentially situated. However, I suspect that the expectations of teachers, counselors, and relatives have a profound impact on Black male college enrollment and high school performance. Clayton and his coauthors, Cynthia Hewitt and Eddie Gaffney, also argue that White female teachers in particular are prone to label Black male students as discipline problems.

The other elephant in the room is the mass incarceration of Black men. In this issue of Contexts Magazine sociologists Bruce Western and Becky Pettit argue that the the wide scale incarceration of Black men is contributing to an increasing divide between Whites and Blacks. Obie Clayton agrees. What should be duly noted is that these same Black male students are less likely to use illegal drugs, but more likely to be arrested for possession of drugs, abuse of drugs, and almost all other drug related charges.

I do think that when it comes to college we are in a crisis, when it comes to Black male enrollment and graduation, but I also think Latino/as are in an even worse crisis. I am not trying to distract from the problems related to Black men, but I have to wonder why the very poor academic performance Latino/as (men and women) is not as well publicized. What we do know is that young Black boys start out with very high expectations, and they like school, but somewhere along the way something happens. Recent studies have found that the “acting White theory” (the notion that doing good in school is a White thing) is not the primary reason for lower performance among Black males. My own sense of this is that the larger cultural expectations cause the funneling of Black boys away from gifted and college prep programs and into special education programs. Then, as Black boys grow into men the labels “less intelligent” and “trouble maker” become internalized. The school administrators, teachers, community members, parents, and other relatives all play a role in shaping this image of Black males. It’s also embedded in the popular culture, where Black men are more likely to be portrayed as violent than intelligent. It doesn’t help that definitions of “manliness” also contributes to this problem. When young Black men are encouraged to be the biggest, baddest, and the toughest, they often end up replicating negative behaviors (behaviors that many young White men can get away with–in particular using or distributing drugs).

So there you have it. Black boys seem to start out very slightly behind Black girls, moderately behind White boys and girls, and well ahead of their Latino/a counterparts. By the time they reach the college level Black men have fallen well behind Black women, and are now performing at the same level as Latinos (men).

I’ll be back with another post on Black men when the next article in the series comes out.

More from Michael Gurian’s Washington Post article (hat tip: Family Scholars Blog) on men’s alleged disappearance from higher education. Mr. Gurian writes:

Actually, a century ago the newspapers and magazines were filled with anxious experts worrying about exactly this - that school was somehow too feminine and tame for boys. In particular, Americans 100 years ago were worried about the negative effects of female teachers - would boys possibly become men if they lacked male role model teachers, or would they grow up to be wimps?

I mention this because what Mr Gurian sees as a new phenomenon, I see as a very old one - the tendency of some social conservatives to view boys as fragile and easily broken or corrupted by exposure to the feminine. Both a century ago and today, even mundane experiences - such as having a female teacher, or being made to sit in a classroom - are seen by some folks as damaging boys’ potential to become successful adult men.

For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, from Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1908:

Mr. Gurian argues that in the past, boys classroom deficiencies were covered up by greater parental involvement, unlike today. And I have to say: huh? Is there any evidence that parents are less involved with their children’s educations today than in the past? If anything, parents are more hyper-involved than ever before - which is probably one reason more kids than ever go on to college after high school.

Mr. Gurian argues that the problem is that boys have brains which don’t do well in a classroom learning environment:

Uh-huh. It’s worth noting that the majority of empirical research has found that mentally, the sexes are far more alike than different (for a recent review, see Janet Hyde’s meta-analysis: “The Gender Similarities Hypothesis,” American Psychologist, Sept. 2005, p 581-592) . Even the famous math and language differences have shrunk to very minor differences over the years.

Take a look at this table (originally printed in the Chronicle of Higher Education, from US Department of Education numbers, and with thanks to Rachel’s Tavern).

If boys have brains that leave them less able to handle schooling than girls, then why is the effect so inconsistant? Why aren’t these base biological differences showing up in middle class white boys, or in asian boys of any class - aren’t they boys too?

What Mr. Gurian sees as a matter of universal differences in brains, looks to me a lot more like a complicated intersection of sex, race, and class.

Of course, it’s still possible that the “boy brains” thesis is true. Perhaps all boys have this “boy brain” defect, but that at some intersections of class and race parents and schools are systematically rescuing boys from their own brains. For instance, perhaps schools - due to racism and classism - are more willing to write off low-income black boys as a loss the first time they fall behind, but attempt to rescue middle-income white and asian boys.[*] And perhaps such “rescue attempts” given boys in the right income and racial classes enough of a boost to overcome the academic disadvantage of having boy brains.

[*] Actually, I have no doubt that this does happen.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. Certainly explanations can be concocted. But if Mr. Gurian’s “boy brain” theory can only be rescued by resorting to explanations which take into account the effects of discrimination, sexism, class and race, we have to ask: what’s left over that we need the “boy brain” theory to explain? What explanatory power does it have, when it seems to fit the data much less well than the theory that if we could overcome the barriers of racism and classism, boys are as capable of flourishing in classrooms as girls are?

Wouldn’t it be simpler, given the differences we see, to start out by assuming that if middle-income white boys are capable of doing as well as middle-income white girls, then boys from other racial and income classes are, too?

It’s clear there is a real crisis going on here. There are way too many boys from indian, black, hispanic and low-income families who are not benefitting from school, and whose future is needlessly dim; it’s a tragedy for those boys and for our entire society if things keep going the way they’ve been. I wish I had the solution, but I don’t. Nonetheless, I’m convinced that wrong analysis will lead us to wrong solutions. The people who are focusing on boy’s brains, and pretty much ignoring class and race, are coming up with solutions that will be expensive and unhelpful at best, and actually harmful at worst.

UPDATE: EL at “My Amusement Park” comments.

I don’t mean to be picking on Brad Wilcox, but I can’t resist commenting on this post. Bouncing off a Washington Post article entitled “Disappearing Act,” about the alleged decline of male college enrollment, Brad writes:

Just added Rad Geek People’s Daily to the blogroll, and I highly recommend y’all check it out. It’s so nice to see a genuinely leftist blog.

I particular liked his critique of Christina Hoff Sommers (and of Salon’s weird dedication to anti-feminism), not because it’s better than his other material, but because it dovetailed with my interests really well. I’m definitely gonna spend some time reading through the archives there.

Oh, and if anyone can tell me the MT code for that cool thing Rad Geek does at the bottom of his blog - where there’s a list of recent posts that aren’t quite recent enough to be on the front page - I’d be grateful.

Ever have some task you had to do, but it’s just so huge that it’s hard to see how to begin? The very prospect of beginning seems too huge, too intimidating.

Which brings me to “Wimps and Barbarians,” by Terrence O. Moore, the Mount Everest of fisking. The essay comes with an unstinting recommendation from Sara at Diotima and appeared in the Claremont Review of Books, so it’s probably not a practical joke.

Then again, maybe Moore is a joker. How else to explain a high school principal who writes this:

I swear, just a handful of paragraphs after expressing a determination not to appear “old and boring,” the man is complaining that those darn young people dress in those damned modern fashions and listen to that awful rock and roll music. Oh, and he makes fun of them for having a teenage vocabulary. (Like, how original.)

Think I’m exaggerating?

Okay, so we’re not going to seem tired or fussy. First step: let’s attack teenage fashion, teenage vocabulary, and teenage music. That sure won’t make us seem old or boring!

Here’s another giggle-worthy bit:

Picture it: you’re a teenager in high school, a bit insecure about masculinity (as nearly all teen boys are). Suddenly, your ex-marine principal Mr. Moore gets in your face and barks “When have you ever been taught what it means to be a man?” The question, full of contempt, assumes its own answer; but you can’t return the contempt, because if you do he’ll throw you in detention or worse.

Is it any surprise that teens react to this “simple” question by stammering and looking at the ground? Not to anyone who has any ability to put himself in a teenager’s shoes. But if Principal Moore could put himself in other people’s shoes, he’d know better than to rail against that Awful Music Kids Like.

Moore’s lack of irony isn’t funny (okay, it isn’t just funny); it also reveals a significant intellectual weakness, which is that Moore doesn’t examine himself or his own ideas critically. Obvious self-contradictions go by without comment; necessary premises underlying his essay are simply assumed, rather than supported with facts or even argument.

For example, the central premise of Moore’s article: Manhood is in decline. Over and over, Principal Moore laments “how we as a nation have lost our sense of true manliness.” We must return to the golden age of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, when men were men.

Of course, Principal Moore’s younger students have grandfathers who, back in the day, wore their hair long, smoked pot and listened to Bob Dylan. And the boring, old Principal Moore’s of that day tore their hair out and lamented that young men nowadays lacked all manhood.

This brings up an essential point, one completely ignored by Principal Moore: How does he know manhood is in decline? If Moore wasn’t ignorant of history, he’d know that chicken littles have been declaring “the manhood is failing! The manhood is failing!” for at least a century and probably much longer.

For example, consider this quote from Herman Scheffauer, who wrote in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1908; modernize the language slightly and it could be taken straight from Principal Moore’s article:

Like Principal Moore, Scheffauer is certain that the young men of his day are failing at manhood - so certain that he doesn’t bother providing any evidence to support his thesis. Scheffauer was by no means alone in his concern - on the contrary, that public schools (and woman teachers) were failing to make boys into virtuous men was a major concern of macho intellectuals nationwide (it was partly to address these concerns that the Boy Scouts were created in 1910).

And so it’s been for every generation of Americans. Principle Moore says that young men of today are disappointing compared to their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. But when the grandpas and great-grandpas were young men, they too were criticized for their lack of proper manhood.

So what’s the deal? Is it possible that manhood has been in a state of tragic decline in every generation for over a century? Maybe, but I doubt it. With hindsight, the men of the 1900s don’t seem vastly manlier than the men of the 1930s, for example. The young men (and women, who Principal Moore ignores) who fought the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s do not, to me, seem less manly and virtuous than their 1920s counterparts. In short, there doesn’t seem to be much reason to think manliness has ever been in crisis, even though we’ve never lacked for chicken littles who tell us otherwise.

But Principal Moore doesn’t address this history - in fact, there’s no reason to think he’s aware of the history of his views.

This isn’t the only case where Moore appears uninformed on his subject. For instance, one of the many villains of Moore’s piece (along with rock music, baseball caps, and female teachers) is the lack of spanking:

It’s the “of course” that amazes me, because it speaks of a self-confidence in one’s own rightness completely unshaken by decades of research finding the opposite. Is Principle Moore so ignorant of the research that it doesn’t even occur to him to attempt to support his “of course” with evidence, or to explain why the last 45 years of research on spanking has all been wrong? From an article on spanking by Murray Straus (a favorite social scientist of anti-feminists, by the way, cited often by Christina Hoff Sommers) in Society (Sept 2001 issue):

Is there an argument for spanking? Perhaps. But Moore doesn’t even bother to make an argument, or to address the fact that opposing views appear considerably more supported by research. It’s as if he believes that his contempt for opposing views, in and of itself, rebuts those views. More likely, Moore is so positive that he must be correct that he couldn’t be bothered researching what peer-reviewed studies have found about spanking. Is doing research - and, indeed, knowing what you’re talking about - too wimpy for a real man like Principal Moore? Maybe.

That’s part one of my climb up Mount Moore. In part two, I’ll get to what I really disliked about this essay.