From Save the Males - Why Men Matter and Why Women Should Care by Kathleen Parker

Women good, men bad

Males have become the portmanteau cause of evil behavior, and it's acceptable to downgrade males.

-Lionel Tiger, Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University

Jackson Marlette was just fourteen when he summed up the anti-male zeitgeist for his father, political cartoonist and author Doug Marlette. They were in a North Carolina chicken joint awaiting their orders when the younger Marlette picked up a tabletop ad boasting boneless chicken and read aloud: "Chicken good, bones bad." Then, beaming with insight, Jackson made the analogous leap and proclaimed: "Women good, men bad!" Yesssssss! Give that boy a lifetime pass to The Vagina Monologues.

Fourteen years isn't long to roam the earth, but boys learn early that they belong to the "bad" sex and their female counterparts to the "good." For many, their indoctrination starts the moment they begin school and observe that teachers (who are, for the most part, females) prefer less rambunctious girl behavior. Boys' programming continues through high school and then into college, where male students are often treated to an orientation primer in sexual harassment and date rape. A friend's son attended one such seminar on his first day at Harvard. "It scared the s--- out of him," his father reported. "He said, 'Dad, I'm never going on a date.' "

Smart lad.

America is a dangerous place for males these days. Look at a girl the wrong way - or the right way, if you're a gal of a certain age (why do you think all those fifty-year-old women are flocking to Italy?) and you'll get slapped. With an open palm if you're lucky; with a lawsuit if you're not. Or worse, a visit to Human Resources for reprogramming. Misinterpret her body language and you might wind up in prison.

The first hint for Jackson and other boys of the now twentysomething generation that life wasn't going to be precisely fair was when, beginning in 1993, they were told that girls would be getting out of school for "Take Our Daughters to Work Day," a creation of the Ms. Foundation for Women and possibly the daffiest idea ever dreamed up in the powder room. This is ancient history now, but not irrelevant to sexual relations today. The familiar premise was that girls needed to visit the working world in order to visualize themselves in nontraditional roles. If they saw women only in the home, where more-traditional mothers presumably spent their days watching soaps and seducing the gardener, how could they grow up to be firemen, jet pilots, and Harvard scientists?

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Something that's hard for many women to admit or understand is that after about age seven, boys prefer the company of men. A woman could know the secret code to Aladdin's cave and it would be less interesting to a boy than a man talking about dirt. That is because a woman is perceived as just another mother, while a man is Man. From Mom, boys basically want to hear variations on two phrases, "I love you" and "Do you want those fried or scrambled?" I learned this in no uncertain terms when I was a Cub Scout leader, which mysteriously seems to have prompted my son's decision to abandon Scouting forever.

My co-Akela (Cub Scout for Wolf Leader) was Dr. Judy Sullivan-friend, fellow mother, and clinical psychologist. Imagine the boys' excitement when they learned who would be leading them in guy pursuits: a reporter and a shrink-two intense, overachieving, helicopter mothers of only boys. Shouldn't there be a law against this? We had our boys' best interests at heart, of course, and did our utmost to be good den mothers. But trust me when I say that seven year-old boys are not interested in making lanterns from coffee tins. They want to shoot bows and arrows, preferably at one another, chop. wood with stone-hewn axes, and sink canoes, preferably while in them.

At the end of a school day, during which they have been steeped in estrogen and told how many "bad choices" they've made, boys are ready to make some really bad choices. They do not want to sit quietly and listen to yet more women speak soothingly of important things. Here's how one memorable meeting began: "Boys, thank you for taking your seats and being quiet while we explain our Women's History Month project," said Akela Sullivan in her calmest psychotherapist voice.

The response to Akela Sullivan's entreaty sounded something like the Zulu nation psyching up for the Brits. I tried a different, somewhat more masculine approach: "Boys, get in here, sit down, and shut up! Now!!" And lo and behold, they did get in there. And they did sit. And they did shut up. One boy, who shall remain unnamed, stargazed into my face and stage-whispered: "I wish you were my mother."

To adults' continuing surprise, children really do want boundaries. Akela Sullivan and I put our heads together, epiphanized in unison, and decided that we would recruit transients from the homeless shelter if necessary to give these boys what they wanted and needed-men. As luck would have it, a Cub Scout's father was semiretired or between jobs or something-we didn't ask-and could attend the meetings. He didn't have to do a thing. He just had to be there and respire testosterone vapors into the atmosphere. His presence shifted the tectonic plates and changed the angle of the earth on its axis. Our boys were at his command, ready to disarm land mines, to sink enemy ships-or even to sit quietly for the sake of the unit, if he of the gravelly voice and sandpaper face wished it so. I suspect they would have found coffee tins brilliantly useful as lanterns if he had suggested as much.

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Schooling Boys and Girlifying History

This is not quantum physics. Civilizations have known for centuries that boys need men to become men. Yet boys, except those lucky enough to attend all-boys schools, are surrounded by women most of their growing-up years. Just 25 percent of the nation's three million public school teachers are male - the lowest percentage in forty years-according to the National Education Association. Looking at the typical American classroom these days, there's a good chance that boys may be bored witless by classes that are mind-numbingly dull and that favor girl interests. I can't count the number of map-coloring assignments and dioramas my son had to build up through twelfth grade. Can you imagine making a seventeen-year-old male decorate little shoeboxes for a grade that will determine his college options? What kind of sadistic insanity is that?

Not surprisingly, boys report that they don't like school. As we strived to make school curricula more girl-friendly to accommodate Ophelia, we've bored Hamlet to distraction. In every demographic, girls are doing better than boys by nearly every developmental benchmark. Calmly, we notice that girls are more successful students than boys, beginning in kindergarten, where teachers report that girls are more attentive and stick with tasks longer. Such is girl nature. Girls' brains are constructed in such a way that they are excellent at multitasking. Not only that, tasking attentively stimulates the female pleasure centers, hence 42 of the National Organization for Women. Girls also earn better grades in high school and are more likely to be straight-A students. More often than boys, girls run for student government and become members of academic clubs, work on the school paper and the yearbook. Girls also score far higher on standardized tests in reading and writing. The only subjects in which boys are still ahead are math and science, but that gap is steadily closing.

Part of girl-powering education has meant that many schools now try to devote as much time to teaching about females as males in history. This is a nice idea, except that women simply haven't accomplished as much as men in the areas that make history. I know this is blasphemy, but there's no way around the facts. Women have done great things, no doubt. Radium! Madame Curie, you rule! But when it comes to the kinds of inventions and events that dot history's timeline, men deserve most of the credit. (And blame, too.) Martha Washington was a great woman, to be sure, but she did not, in fact, lead the American Revolution. George did, and it's his face, not hers, on the dollar bill. We have to try to deal with that.

By genuflecting to equity in all matters great and small, we've created a new generation of Americans who may be more sensitive, but they don't know much about history. At Mount Vernon-home of Martha Washington, who was married to what's-his-name, executive director James Rees reels off a series of telling statistics: Only one in ten high school seniors is proficient in American history. A survey of fourth graders found that seven of ten thought the original thirteen colonies included Texas, California, and Illinois. Six in ten

couldn't say why the Pilgrims came to America. Only 7 percent of fourth graders could name "an important event" that took place in Philadelphia in 1776. When seniors at the top fifty-five universities in the country were asked to name America's victorious general at the Battle of Yorktown, only 34 percent named George Washington.