The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men

by Christina Hoff Sommers, Coleen Marlo (Narrator)

An updated and revised edition of the controversial classic - now more relevant than ever - argues that boys are the ones languishing socially and academically, resulting in staggering social and economic costs.

Girls and women were once second-class citizens in the nation's schools. Americans responded with concerted efforts to give girls and women the attention and assistance that was long overdue. Now, after two major waves of feminism and decades of policy reform, women have made massive strides in education. Today they outperform men in nearly every measure of social, academic, and vocational well-being. Christina Hoff Sommers contends that it's time to take a hard look at present-day realities and recognize that boys need help.

Called "provocative and controversial...impassioned and articulate" (The Christian Science Monitor), this edition of The War Against Boys offers a new preface and six radically revised chapters, plus updates on the current status of boys throughout the audiobook. Sommers argues that the problem of male underachievement is persistent and worsening. Among the new topics Sommers how the war against boys is harming our economic future, and how boy-averse trends such as the decline of recess and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies have turned our schools into hostile environments for boys.

As our schools become more feelings-centered, risk-averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic needs of boys. She offers realistic, achievable solutions to these problems that include boy-friendly pedagogy, character and vocational education, and the choice of single-sex classrooms.

The War Against Boys is an incisive, rigorous, and heartfelt argument in favor of recognizing and confronting a new Boys are languishing in education, and the price of continued neglect is economically and socially prohibitive.

Audible Audio

Published May 29, 2018

About the author

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.
Sommers' positions and writing have been characterized by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy as "equity feminism", a classical-liberal or libertarian feminist perspective holding that the main political role of feminism is to ensure that the right against coercive interference is not infringed. Sommers has contrasted equity feminism with what she terms victim feminism and gender feminism, arguing that modern feminist thought often contains an "irrational hostility to men" and possesses an "inability to take seriously the possibility that the sexes are equal but different". Several writers have described Sommers as anti-feminist.

Reviews

[Curtisha Lewis · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s a really dry read, but informative of the various ways researchers created blanket studies that resulted in stereotype of the typical male in America. These ideas became the foundation of the uprising in programs driven to uplift young girls and box in young boys.

[Jessin Stalnaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

More informational, then helpful. We know there is a war against boys after reading this book, so what do we do about it? The author just skims the surface of answering the question.