American Enterprise Institute is the author or coauthor of four nonfiction books including who stole feminism . how women have betrayed women, Mcnerney King and the revised war against boys how misguided policies are harming our young men. Christina hoff summers, how do you define feminism . In the best sense feminism is the philosophy is that says the plant women are equal before the law. They deserve the same rights, the same liberties, equal dignity end 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 . The new feminism emerged especially in thes and 90s and is a hardline version. I became a feminist in the 70s. I did not appreciate male chauvinism and believed in equality of opportunity. However, in the 80s and 90s, i was reading a feminist the arrests and feminist philosophers and there were furious that were so aggressive in their harshly anti mail. As i read these textbooks it was as if they were following the model women are from venus, are from hell. I didnt become a feminist to denigrate men. Was a reverse chauvinism. We have antagonism to men. So i took exception to that. Many other things. I found i even developed terms. I called myself and equity feminists, who once for women what she wants for every one. Basic respect and equality. The other school law called gender feminism because they believed in the sex gender system and there were a group of the arrests who thought that women wear an oppressed class and the oppression was systemic and every Major Institution was the patriarchy. It was not enough to improve the condition of women or change laws, the system, the gender system had to be dismantled. That led to some very radical proposals that very few women wanted. Most women want their right. They want to be liberated from the capitalist patriarchal Oppressive Society if there is such a thing. There may be places in the world where there is such a thing but the United States, feminism was a Great Success story and i didnt find my colleagues in feminist philosophy celebrating that success. Almost as if things got better for women, they became more resentful and angry and to what me appear to be a Conspiracy Theory about the patriarch. Host was the Feminism Movement of the 60s necessary in the u. S. In your view . Guest absolutely. Before feminism, it started in nearly 60s and there were arbitrary Barriers Holding women back. You could look at a newspaper and there were jobs for men and jobs for women. It was as if women could do a few things and men could do everything else. That had to change. It had to change. Was oppressive for some many women, held back so many women. There were schools where women werent welcome, hard for women to enter professions. Women who could have been biologist, philosophers, were simply not welcome. A very rare woman could break through. That had to change. Had to raise consciousness about violence against women, sexual harassment. There were legitimate equity issues and i am very grateful, all women must be grateful to the activists and legislators that changed things very much for the better. Host what are some of the laws that passed the that you think were good for more equality . Guest the equal pay act, a series of Supreme Court hearings you could fire woman because she was pregnant, eventually had laws against harassment in the workplace, things that had once seemed this is just life, people proposition each other in the workplace, it turned out there was a disparate impact on women in the workplace with this kind of sexual overtures that were sometimes used to pressure women, almost blackmail women. That needed to shane and more laws protecting women from discrimination and harassment so certainly a strong proponent, almost all the equity legislation in the 60s and 70s. Host if you were to explain from your book who stole feminism . how women have betrayed women, it is unworthy of dignified feminism and educationally harmful. Yes. Introducing you to a new vocabulary. Came from the gender feminists, synonymous with victim feminism or hardline feminism. They took what they called a dino centric view, some young women wanted to be called dino americans. I had colleagues who referred to the dish they didnt like the word seminar because it is associated with emphasis on power so they came up with a feminist equivalent. That was funny but they werent kidding. It was almost as if they wanted to reject everything men had done. I and many other equity feminists, wonderful women who have been dissidents like me, cathy young, many of us believe that the purpose of feminism was so women could win men in creating culture, women could join men is on an equal footing as lawyers and doctors and businesses and all the professions. Wasnt about rejecting all the things men had done. That is why i called it destructive. There were many young women who had come to college especially they would take courses where they were taught to have contempt for the achievements of the great male philosophers. And as a philosophy professor who spend all my time trying to encourage students to read and understand and appreciate plato and aristotle and descartes and to have my colleagues telling students these were males and we need a female versions of it was almost as if they were replacing what men had done with what hardline feminists were doing. That wasnt equivalent because they left out most women because we want our rights bill we are not hardliners, we dont think of ourselves as biocentric. Host you have a chapter caldwell we report in who stole feminism . how women have betrayed women. What is that . Guest the American Association of University Women in the mid 90s commission Wellesley Center for research on women to study the wellbeing of girls in school and was intitled how schools change girls, and if we were to go back into the mid 90s you would think that our schools were hospital environments for girls, they were secondclass citizens, they were held back in every way which was important when in fact it was the exact opposite. The wellesley report was a very wellmeaning they were so carried away with his victim agenda they failed to notice it was actually boys who had lower grades, boys who were more likely to drop out and less likely to go to college and yet not only did we have the wellesley report, but Carol Gilligan at Harvard University debating girls as she said a are drowning and disappearing in a sea of western culture, that was her quotation, mary piper talking about revising ophelia, young women were in a state of extreme duress and suffering and falling behind, the exact opposite was true. Girls by the mid 90s were flourishing in ways which were unprecedented. As a philosophy professor i would look at my classroom, increasingly female dominated. The girls were getting the better grades and rising. I began to check these facts to find out how did they come a there was so much success for women, women were Getting Better grades and more likely to go to college how do they turn that into bad news for women . And there you find a lot of what has gone wrong. Host you talk about being on pbs in your book and there was discussion on feminism and what happened there, the followup on dateline. What is that story . Guest they had done research on they claimed in a classroom boys call out eight times more than girls and when a girl will call out an answer she is likely to be told sitdown and waiting till you are called on. Boys, the teacher will engage and respectfully entertain what they have to say. This call out gap became a signature factoid of the shortchange girls movement. You could google it and find it in nearly every news report, this injustice to girls, boys are dominating the classroom. I wanted to see the research, human stall laius check the data and in the case of this research i couldnt find it. It didnt appear there was anywhere where this factoid was documented. It turned out he had done a study for the department of education and submitted a report which was lost somewhere in the department of education. Later, u. S. News and world report tried to track it down. Wasnt able to do it. Professor judith kleinfilled called and it wasnt exactly 81, reporters at the time, the boston globe, as they reported the statistic that is true, parents were told much more voluble, and shrinking violence. Exactly the opposite is true. The typical classroom, no one calls on them. It is true boys get more attention, more careful research, it was negative attention. Boys are more unruly or the teacher will say the president of france, johnny is not listening, there are more reprimands but more positive engagement comment in fact fairly good data from the department of education that they feel they have a right to express their opinions and if the teacher wants to hear what they have to say and far fewer boys feel that way. Host that leads into your second book the war against boys how misguided policies are harming our young men. Just updated this year. The new edition came out this year. What is gender Awareness Education . Some Educators Want to make gender salient in raising student consciousness and reversing if they read a fairy tale they will say sexism and have a fairy tale that reverses that and also the earliest age by making children aware what i think isnt true, want to make formal engenders a social invention. We are all just bore an androgynous and society imposes masculinity and femininity. Most people have a gender identity that is feminine or masculine. Not all, there are exceptions. As a rule is important, the critical part of your identity if you are a girl or boy and it is not something that is easily changed and there are differences and it is accommodation of biology and culture. We dont know the exact balance, being determined to deny biology is playing a role and feel that you have a gender aware classroom and the teacher is aware she should try to raise and try to make genderless salient. You raised through consciousness about gender while trying to diminish stereotypical expressions like little girls that they should you go to a to the playground little girls play differently from boys. The average little boy in cages in roughandtumble play, not fighting, sound effects, noise iran rowdier the better. Girls do that too but they do it a lot less. For little girls there are turn taking games, theatrical imaginative games, playing school, playing house and exchanging confidencess with a best friend. There are educators, they want to go in and change that. Typically they want boys to play more like barrels because for some reason it is as if as one psychologists at barrels of the Gold Standard in education. Boys are viewed as defective girls, very often, increasingly berries and intolerance for useful masculinity. The high spirited play of little boys, 6 and 7yearolds who engage in a lot of imaginative narrative involving superheros, rescuing people and killing the bad guys, jr. Says bang bang he could be held to have run afoul of the schools zero tolerance policy. Quote kids as young as 5 or 6 have been suspended for violating the rule against having firearms in school. I am in favor of zero tolerance. In my mind that is the child brings a weapon, not little boys playing cops and robbers but that is happening across the country. One little boy was suspended because he shoots a pop tart into the shape of a gun. He was suspended. His parents were appalled. He is a little boy, not a criminal. Anyway, in the playground there is increasing in tolerance for a little bullies. Host in the war against boys how misguided policies are harming our young men you write american boys do not need to be rescued. They are not pathological. They are not seething with repressed rage or imprisoned in straitjackets of masculinity. American girls are not suffering a crisis of confidence, nor are they being silenced by the culture. Guest we have to stop apologizing children, boys and girls. Children are not helped if they are treated as though they are defective or deviant or in the case of boys toxic in some way. I do believe children need to be civilized, need to open their hearts and minds and teach them to be caring, considerate human beings. That does not mean forcing boys to be exactly like girls and it doesnt mean treating girls as if they are shrinking and flowering and failing ophelias. There is too much apologizing, children of resilience and for the most part this is a radical thing to say, most of them are quite healthy including most bullish. We have to freeze their distinction among sociologists, have to preserve a distinction between pathological masculinity and healthy masculinity. A young man who displays pathological masculinity shows his manhood by being destructive, by preying on weaker people, by tearing things apart, basically a reign of terror and. Aa who is displaying healthy masculinity is the opposite, he doesnt destroy. He doesnt prey on weaker people, he protects. I believe that is a majority of men i have known. If i look at the date of the majority of men in United States are displaying healthy masculinity. Little boy is running around a playground playing cops and robbers, terrible to confuse that with pathology but in many schools that is what we are doing. Theres a wonderful researcher at the university of minnesota who is an expert on playground dynamics says roughandtumble play is the universal play of little boys, crosscultural, you find males will engage in a lot of chasing behavior, high spirited fighting and so forth. Teachers and parents are not making the distinction between roughandtumble play and violence. They are letting critical lessons about self control, and friendships, it is quite violent. They part as enemies. Of very unhappy thing to see. A joyful dispirited natural play of little boys. Boys do it, most of them, not all but most, as much as you let them, not making distinctions, healthy masculinity, pathological masculinity. Small percentage of boilers are pathological. They want to be careful, a young sociopath in our midst we do everything we can to protect ourselves and everyone, that is rare. As a society we are making confusion, there have been shocking examples of pathological male behavior and to project that on to the majority of healthy boys and young men. Host when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten childrens prospects, their moral drift, cognitive and scholastic deficits, the healers, social reformers and confidence builders dont have the answers. On the contrary they stand in the way of genuine solutions. Yes. I am not saying we dont have problems in our school. I dont thing boils are pathological but there is good evidence that they need Character Education and girls do too. Most societies know that it takes more effort to socialize a young man and young boys who are morally neglected. Very unpleasant ways of doing this, i have noticed. Most societies in just a lot of effort into humanizing, civilizing young men. What i have seen is in our school there has been a decline of Character Education and moral education, move replacing it with things like selfesteem programs, various therapeutic approaches that are we have a tried and true method of civilizing boys. It is through good sportsmanship, they can get from their coaches and moral guidance from parents, but reinforced by teachers and moved away from that. I believe now boys have become secondclass citizens in our schools and their problems i neglected. A young man today is less likely to go to college than his sister. Across all ethnic groups and racial groups and socioeconomic groups you find boys are behind their female counterparts, far less literate, the average 15yearold boy has the writing skills of a 13yearold girl, he is reading a yearandahalf behind her, most importantly boys like school lot less, are more disengaged. There may have been a time this wasnt a big problem, we had an economy where you could get a High School Degree and work hard and make it into the middle class and educators at Harvard Graduate School of education said the passport to the middle classes to be the high school diploma. Not anymore. There is the new passport to the middle class which is Education Beyond High School and girls are getting it less and less. That problem, i cant find major organizations or government groups, the department of education is still talking about a short changed girl because they were influenced by the Early Research that said girls were shortchanged in the 1990s. They havent adjusted or adapted to the times. We have a White House Council on women and girls that is concerned about the education of girls and girls dont fall behind and went it is bullies who by almost every significant metric significantly behind girls. We need a White House Council on bullies as well. Host in a recent article you wrote women in the u. S. Earn 62 of associates degrees, 57 of bachelors degrees, 60 of masters degrees, 52 of doctorate, college emissions officers, first baffled and concerned and finally panicked over the deaths of male applicants. If male enrollment falls below 40 or below female students begin to fully. Officials at schools at or near that Tipping Point are helplessly watching as campuses become like retirement villages, women competing for a handful of surviving men. There are campuses Admissions Officers are looking at, 62 , 65 , it gets worse each year. They are panicked. The administrator at the college of william and mary said we have to do something where the college of william and mary, not the college of mary and mary. Educational statisticians, trends continue by 26 g8, the last day will graduate from college. A grain of truth. It is quite a mystery and why girls would be, so much more aware of the importance of the education and girls have higher aspirations and some people say this is only manifest in the working class. It is across class you see girls outperforming the boys and this year a