Host how do you define feminism . Guest in the best sense feminism is a philosophy that says that men and women are equal before long, deserve the same rights, the same liberties, the equal dignity, and basically a philosophy of basic fairness. Host in your book, who stole feminism how women have betrayed women, you talk about the new feminism. What is the new feminism . Guest yes, well, the new feminism emerged especially in the 80s and 90s and is a rather hardline version. I became a feminist in the i believed in equality of opportunity however in the 80s and 90s as ani philosophy professor readingere feminist theories and there were some theories that or soly aggressive with rather harshly antimail there were following the of mono with men are from venus and men are from the hell. I did not need to denigrate the bet it was a reversed seven this so i took exception to that and in e found that i developed terms. N what she wants for everyone, fairness, basic respect and equality. But the other school i called gender feminism because they believed in what they called the secs tender system. There were a group of terrorists shootout that women were an oppressed group and the oppression was systemic and that every Major Institution felt the impressive patriarchy. It was not enough to improve the condition of women or change laws, the system, the gender system had to be dismantled. And that led to some very radical proposals. Very few women most women want their rights. Want to be liberated from the capitalist patriarchal Oppressive Society if there is such a thing. There may be places in the world where such things, the united states, i felt that in the 90s feminism was a Great Success story. I did not find my colleague celebrating my success. It was almost as if things are better for women and they became more resentful and angry. What may appear to be a Conspiracy Theory about the patriarchy. Host was the Feminism Movement of the 60s the early feminist, was it necessary in the u. S. In your view . Guest absolutely. Before the second wave of feminism that started in the early sixties there were also arbitrary Barriers Holding the men back. You can look at a newspaper and there were jobs for men and jobs for women. I still remember that. Women could do a few things and men could do everything else. That had to change. It had to change because it was impressive for so many women. It held back so many talented wed, and there were schools where women were not welcome. Very hard for women to enter. They simply were not welcome. A very rare woman could break through. So that had to change. We also had to raise consciousness about violence against women, sexualharassment there were legitimate equity issues, and i am very grateful to all women and young women mostly grateful to the activists and the legislators during the second wave of feminism that change things very much for the better. These overtures were sometimes used, especially on blackmail women. And that needed to change. So more laws protecting women from discrimination and from harassment. So certainly a strong proponent of the equity legislation. Host if you have explained this from your book, who stole feminism, you said promoting this gynocentric critique of knowledge. Guest thats right, a new type of work, it is what they call a gynocentric type of view. And there may even be some women who dont completely understand that. And so they came up with this equivalent. But they werent kidding. So this gynocentric term, its almost as if they wanted to reject everything that one had done. And then there are dissidents like me and cathy young, many of us, we believe that the typical feminism is that we could join on equal terms in all the professions and it wasnt about rejecting all the things that had been done. There were many young women who would come to college, especially the elite colleges, and they would take courses for the achievements of the great male philosophers, and the great mail philosophers in all my time trying to encourage students to read and understand and appreciate plato and aristotle and then to have my colleagues, my male colleagues, its almost as if they were replacing them with what hardline feminists were doing and that was not equivalent because we also left out this because most women, as i said, would be hardline it, and we did not think of ourselves as gynocentric. Host of a chapter called the wesleyan report. What is that . Guest in the mid90s the university studied the wellbeing of girls in school and it was an entitled how schools change girls. And if we were to go back into the mid90s, you would think that our schools were hostile environments for girls, that there were terms where they were secondclass citizens and held back in every way, which is important facts. But it was the opposite. The wellesley report was those were very wellmeaning women. They were carried away and they failed to notice that was actually boys who had the lower grades and dropout. And yet not only did we have the wellesley report, but we had harvard university, and she sent us if it where they were drowning in a sea of western culture. And we talked about reviving ophelia as though young women were in a state of extreme duress and suffering and falling behind and we have exact opposite that is true. They were forcing in ways in which it was unprecedented. But look at it in my classrooms and it was the girls were getting the better grades and just thriving. And so i began to check these facts and i thought, how did they come up when there was so much success for them and women were Getting Better grades and how did they turn that into bad news for women . So i think that you find a lot with what has gone wrong with the contemporary Womens Movement. Host you talked about being on pbs with david sachar and there was a discussion on feminism and what happened which was a followup on dateline. So what is the story . David sachar and his wife, they have done research and they claim that any classroom, voice call out eight times more than girls and one a girl well call out an answer, she is likely to be told to sit down and wait until you are called upon. Boys are taught to engage and containers. So you could google it and find it in every news report. Giving injustice to girls that boys are dominating the classroom and they have silence that is diminished. And i wanted to see the research. And by the time i was engaging with the gender educators, i learned that you must always check the data. And i just couldnt find it. He did not appear that the research was anywhere that this factoid was documented. And it turned out that he had done a study for the department of education and it was lost somewhere in the department of education. Later, she wasnt able to do it, the professor did a followup and he admitted that it wasnt exactly 81, it was less a matter Something Like that. But none of that, for some reason, the reporters of the time, including the washington post, they reported this statistic as true. Boys were treated much more respectfully and valuable and they assert themselves and girls are sort of lacking balance. That is exactly the opposite was true. A typical classroom, the boys are often sitting in the back to spring the known cause on them and its true that they may get more attention in some cases, but more careful Research Shows that its negative attention at times because boys are more unruly and so the teacher will say, who do you think is the president of france and that is because john is not listening. So they are more recognized, the more positive engagements, those that have positive engagements. Those are rare. And we feel that they have the right to express their opinions and if the teacher wants to hear what they have to say. So i agree that boys do that. Host that leads to your second book, just updated this year, the war against boys how misguided policies are harming our young men. Guest there are some educators who want to make gender is salient in raising the student consciousness and sort of reversing if they read a fairy tale life, and also just at the earliest age, making children aware, they want to make them aware that gender is a social invention and that we are born endogenous and that society imposes us. I have yet to believe that. I think that we are born, most people have it as a gender identity thats very strong and not all. There are exceptions, but as a rule. Its very important in a critical part of your identity if you are a girl or a boy. And its not something that is easily changed and there are differences as well. It is an accommodation of biology and culture and we dont know the exact balance, but there are those who do deny that biology is playing a role in a field that if you have a gender aware classroom and the teacher is aware, that we should try to erase it or make it less salient. While trying to diminish stereotypical expressions. So if little girls are tending to if you go to a typical playground, the little girls play somewhat differently than the boys. The average little boy engages in roughandtumble play, sound effects, the boys that are the rowdier, the better, but girls do it too, but they do a lot less. Theatrical imaginative games, playing house, and there was an exchange and confidences as well. But there are educators who want to go in and change that and particularly they look at the girls. As one psychologist said the girls are the standard in education and this is very sad. There is an intolerant or typical youthful masculinity. We will have six and 7yearolds engaging in a lot of imaginative narratives involving superheroes. So there is mock fighting and also rescuing people, killing the bad guys so he could be held to be and we have little boys as young as five or six being suspended. For violating the rule against having firearms in school. And im very much in favor of zero tolerance for firearms in school. But that was happening in one little boy was suspended because he chewed a pop tart into the shape of a gun, a sixyearold and he was suspended and his parents were mortified. I said, hes a little boy, is not a criminal. But anyway, in the playground, there is increasing intolerance for the actions of boys. Host the right that americans boys do not need to be rescued, they are not pathological, they are not seething with repressed rage or imprisoned in straight jackets of masculinity. American girls are not suffering a crisis of confidence nor are they being silenced by the culture. Guest yes, we have to stop apologizing children, boys and girls, children are not helped if they are treated as though they are defective or deviant and in the case of boys, toxic in some ways. So i do believe that children need to be civilized, we have to open our hearts and minds and teach them to be caring and considerate human beings, but that does not mean that forcing boys to be exactly like girls is right, it doesnt mean being girls as if they are failing ophelias at and for the most part, and this is a radical thing to say, most of them are quite healthy. And including most boys. We have to preserve a distinction, which is why sociologists have to do speed have a distinction between healthy masculinity. A young man that displays pathological masculinity, he shows his manhood by being destructive and tearing things apart, just basically a reign of terror. And the boy that has been healthy is the opposite. He is the opposite and he builds and he doesnt prey upon people he protects. And i still believe that that is the majority of men that i have known, and if i look at the data, the majority of men in the united states, they are they have been displaying healthy masculinity. The boys playing cops and robbers, its terrible to confuse that with pathology, but with many schools, that is what we are doing. Theres a wonderful researcher, Anthony Pellegrini at the university of minnesota is an expert on Program Dynamics and he says that he roughandtumble type of play is the universal play a little boys. It is it is cross culturally part of the species. Males will engage in chasing behaviors and highspirited mock fighting and so forth. And Anthony Pellegrini has pointed out that increasingly teachers and parents are not making the distinction between roughandtumble play and violence. So when boys are playing that way, there is joy, theres a lot of bonding, they are learning critical lessons about selfcontrol. Social skills of all sorts. When they finish playing, they are the friendships are stronger. But with violence of quite different. Its a very unhappy thing to see. It is completely opposite with roughandtumble play. It is the joyful, spirited, natural play a little boys everywhere. Girls do it as well, but not nearly as much, boys just do it most, not all as much as you let them. And again not making distinctions, healthy masculinity, pathological masculinity. You have to be very careful and we have to do everything we can to protect ourselves and malice is rare. And there has been a tendency to project that into the majority of healthy boys and young men. Host when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten the moral drift and cognitive and scholastic deficits, the healers, social reformers and confidence builders, do not have the answers. On the contrary, they stand in the way of a genuine solution. Yes. Im not saying that we dont have problems in our schools, even though i dont think that boys are pathological, i do think that there is evidence that they need Character Education as girls do as well. As most societies know, it takes more effort to socialize a young man and young boys who are morally neglected, and in most societies, they invest a lot of effort into civilizing young man. In our schools there has been a decline of Character Education and moral education and replacing it with things like selfesteem programs, various programs that are doubtful and merit. And we have a triedandtrue method of civilizing boys, good sportsmanship they can get from their coaches, most of all from parents, and weve kind of moved away from that. The second problem with boys, is that i believe they have become secondclass citizens in our schools. And the problems are severely neglected. A young man today is less likely to go to college than his sister, and you look across all the ethnic groups and racial groups and socioeconomic groups, and define that boys are behind their female counterparts and they are far less literate than the average 15yearold boy has been writing skills of a 13yearold girl. Reading about a year. 5 behind and most importantly, boys like school less and they are more disengaged and there may have been a time when this wasnt a big problem and we were in an economy where you could make it into the middle class. And some educators say that the passport to middle class used to be the high school diploma. But not anymore. There is a new economy and a new passport to middle class is education beyond high school. And girls seem to be getting at amboise lesson lasts. So i feel that that problem i cannot find major organizations or government groups and the department of education is still talking about the shortchange of this because they were deeply influenced by the Early Research that said the girls werent shortchanged. So they havent adjusted to the times. We have the white house counsel, women and girls, concerned about the education of girls so girls dont fall behind. And when its boys, its like they are significantly behind girls. So i think we need this as well. Host you write that women in the u. S. Now earn 62 of the associate degrees and 57 of bachelors degrees and 60 of masters degrees and 52 of doctorates, College Admissions officers, they were first baffled and unconcerned and finally panic over the growth of male applicants. Male enrollment falls below 40 or below, females flee, officials at schools at or near the Tipping Point are helplessly watching as campuses become like retirement villages with women competing for a handful of surviving men. Guest Admissions Officers are looking at 60 female, 65 come it seems to get worse each year, and yes, i would say they are cannot and they said we have to do something and we are the college of william and mary and not mary and mary. And there is one educational statistician in the last mail will graduate from college and he was being facetious. But it is a grain of truth. Quite a mystery as to why the girls would be so much more aware of the importance of education. And girls even have higher aspirations and some people say, it is manifesting in across classes that you see the girls outperforming the boys. And among the highest performers, girls are not only getting far more high grades, but they are more ambitious and again, i celebrate this with what has happened with girls and it is inspiring. I just wish they would discover that there are gender differences and i wish it happened instead of becoming a partisan movement, but a movement to improve the aspect of all children and have boys where they were falling behind girls and that would have been part of this because they were not doing as well as boys at one point time and we have managed to close that gap. And we have been writing this in general. And i dont blame the teachers for this, but they have a bias against students and its students to commit five or six years old. And i think we want to find a way to make the classroom a happy place for them and room for their personalities and highspirited mess and i just really havent done a good enough job at that. Host is there a shortage of male teachers and does this have an effect . Guest there is a shortage and this may be a slight exaggeration, the Current System says that schools are run by women for girls. Its a facetious statement, but not by too much. Its the saddest comment that i ever read, a group of interviewers asking why did you drop out and there is one way that said i just thought nobody wanted me there. And theres a lot of voices feel that way. It sort of heartbreaking. And its not directly towards boys. Host you say that young men may be a dying breed on college campuses, but some have no trouble attracting them, schools that include the letters check. Guest thats right, almost all of the Technology Schools come youll find that the boys turn out in large numbers. Again, we are supposed to say that males and females are cognitively interchangeable and that is the politically correct view among certain educators and politicians and certainly gender scholars. And i do think that there is a difference on average and we