The Lace Curtain’s University Targets

Aside from the most prestigious universities, the lace curtain has been most apparent at previously women-only colleges that are now supposed to be equally open to men; at religious colleges and seminaries; and in the liberal arts. In all three, male attendance has been in dramatic decline.

At previously women-only colleges such as Mills and Texas Women’s University, the slogans were identical: “Better Dead than Co-Ed.”[1]

In 1980 seminaries were 20% female; by the mid-’90s they were 70% female.[2] Why? In many seminaries and religious colleges, “male-dominated religions” are seen as hierarchical oppressors of women (rather than seen as involving the sacrifice of a man like Jesus to save mostly-female churchgoers from their sins). Seminaries have increasingly been influenced by thinkers such as Mary Daly, a religious studies professor whose Beyond God the Father had a seminal impact in the 1970s. Daly advocates “the death of God the Father” because he has made “the oppression of women right and fitting.”[3]

 Positive images that used to refer only to men, like God-as-He, have been changed in books as traditional as the Bible;[4] negative images, like the Devil-as-He, have not been changed. Ironically, since 85% of the street homeless are men,[5] this attitude of men as privileged does not prepare many seminarians to deal with their future constituency.

The anger released from women’s studies’ floodgates has permeated all of the liberal arts. Misandry is most potent in anthropology, literature, foreign languages, and, most ironically, in social work, psychology, and communications.

Some of our sons are growing up in female-only homes and going to schools with mostly female teachers. If they then choose the liberal arts, they are forced into a mantra of “Why can’t I be more like a woman?” How does this happen?

Suppose your son or daughter wants to take literature or languages. Prior to the dominance of feminism, she or he would have been exposed to the pros and cons of many potential approaches to literature (e.g., psychoanalytical; post structuralist; reader response critical; new historicist). But in a Modern Language Association(MLA) poll of English professors on 350 campuses, 61% said they now approached literature from a feminist perspective.[6]

Thus an atmosphere is created (“If you know on which side your bread is buttered...”). Reporters attending the MLA convention for Newsweek and US News & World Report describe the atmosphere as so anti-male that presentations of Jane Austen, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Emily Bronte, E. L. Doctorow, and most literary giants were quickly converted into condemnations of men, or the white-male-dominated, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy.[7]

If our sons don’t adopt the feminist version, they are labeled and ostracized – aliens in their chosen profession; if they do adopt it, they are aliens to themselves.

I have felt the impact of this misandry in the liberal arts in my own life. When I began speaking from only a feminist perspective, I was immediately invited to Yale to be a week-long, quasi-resident scholar. (Before I had a Ph.D.) When I began adding men’s perspectives, my speaking income at colleges and universities dropped by more than 90%.

I responded by agreeing to not just speak alone, but to speak with opposition. But few feminists, now high in credibility on campus, want to put it at risk.    Necessity being the parent of invention, I finally found a debate partner: myself. I set up two podiums: “Dr. Warren Farrell, Masculist” and “Dr. Warren Farrell, Feminist.” I run back and forth between the two podiums, debating myself, interrupting myself (and otherwise tempting the boundaries of schizophrenia!).

The speaking censorship had its parallel in teaching censorship. Remember how Suzanne Steinmetz, after she published her findings on domestic violence, discovered years later how feminists contacted other feminists at the University at which she taught to undermine her tenure? I had a parallel, although very different, experience. When I was teaching only from the feminist perspective, it didn’t make any difference what my training was in, I was able to teach in five different disciplines within the liberal arts.[8]

Since Why Men Are The Way They Are was published, however, I have not been offered a position in a liberal arts discipline at any college or university. Yes, I have taught in the School of Medicine at the University of California at San Diego, but not in the liberal arts. Most men who enter the liberal arts cannot afford to make decisions that put their career and family at risk. Ironically, only my savings from the days of speaking from a feminist perspective have allowed to take those risks.

Elementary Schools, High Schools, and the AAUW

“But in what way has this [ant] society evolved beyond that of humans? It is far ahead in women’s liberation. Male ants are totally unimportant. When their biological usefulness is over, they are discarded and not permitted to return to the nest. The entire ant social world is female, including the soldiers, the workers, the farmers, and, of course, the queen. Male ants have wings, and they are expected to use them – to get out.”

—from Getting the Facts, a sixth-grade textbook used in New York state.[9]

For the past decade, no study has had more influence on our belief that schools shortchange only our daughters than the one commissioned and publicized by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) titled “How Schools Shortchange Girls: A Study of Major Findings on Girls and Education.”[10]

The report was the catalyst for tens of thousands of schools to pay teachers to be trained to address the way their schools “shortchanged” only girls, especially in four areas: math; science; teacher attention; and self esteem. Similarly, in response to this research, all-girl schools are forming throughout the United States even as all-boy schools are being protested[11]....

In Manhattan, most of the seven private girls’ schools had 10 applications for each $17,000-plus kindergarten opening for the Fall of 1999, and a public girls’ school that was formed after the AAUW study’s publicity took hold, was also deluged with applications.[12]

I applaud teacher training and the encouragement of our daughters to enter math and science. But something happened on the way to the forum…. Had the AAUW commissioned a balanced study of studies, they would have found that boys:

• have lower grades (they do worse in reading, writing, social studies, spelling, biology, art, visual arts, music, theater, languages, and every subject except math and science... );

• receive fewer honors;

• have lower class ranks;

• are more likely to repeat a grade;

• are more likely to be put in special education;

• are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia);

• are up to four times as likely to commit suicide;

• have a suicide rate that is increasing while girls’ is decreasing;

• drop out sooner;

• are much less likely to attend college;

• are much less likely to graduate from college;

• are less likely to take SATs, GREs;

• have more attention deficit disorder problems, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorders;

• have more discipline problems.

Without incorporating studies of those areas in which boys are the losers in school, it is impossible for the AAUW to fairly conclude that schools shortchange girls. What we do know is that no one is doing worse than African-American boys in urban areas. Yet the public school formed in Harlem after the AAUW study was for girls, not boys.[13]

What did the lace curtain of the AAUW and media keep out of the public consciousness? We heard virtually nothing about the first study of arts education by the US Department of Education in 20 years.[14] Why? Perhaps because of the findings. Girls outperformed boys in all the arts (music, visual arts, theater), and in all the modalities of execution – from creating and performing to interpreting. In music performance, girls had an average score of 40 percent; boys, 27 percent. What are we doing about it? First, it helps to know about it.

While the AAUW popularized the low self-esteem of girls,  we heard little about the Harvard Medical School study asking teenage boys to write a story based on a drawing of an adult man in a shirt and tie sitting at a desk while looking with a neutral expression at a photo of a woman and children. Only 15% of the boys envisioned a contented family man. Instead, “the overwhelming majority constructed narratives about lonely husbands working overtime to support their families, divorced men missing their loved ones, and grief-stricken widowers.”[15]

The Harvard study found boys from the US, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom doing worse than girls, and concluded it was the boys who are now educationally disadvantaged.[16] Despite these findings teachers, it found, are being required to take gender equity courses that have “become especially vigilant, even obsessive, about making sure that the voices of girls” are heard, even as boys are cast as villains.[17]

For almost two decades the number of women in colleges and universities has exceeded the number of men, even though college-age men outnumber college-age women.[18] But during this period, the US Government started programs on Girl Power to encourage women in schools, but no programs on Boy Power to encourage boys in schools. The Girl Power-type government programs are based on the thinking that girls are the minority – a two-decade-old anachronism.

What our sons lost were the solutions that might have emerged from even a small amount of attention to them. Solutions such as:

• training teachers to understand what boys are missing when they go from mother-only homes to a female teacher in an almost all-female-staffed school (e.g., a male teacher being more likely to see a drug dealer as a potential entrepreneur who needs his energy rechanneled)

• affirmative action programs to recruit and give scholarships to some of the finest young men to become elementary school teachers

• a Dad in the Classroom program to pay companies to allow men to take a week leave of absence to teach, preferably in their own child’s class – thus exposing students to a variety of male role models and professional opportunities.

One reason the 1990s went without attention to our sons is that no American Association of University Men (AAUM) pointed out the gaps between the AAUW’s publicity and the actual data from the very studies they commissioned. For example, that both boys and girls agree that teachers think girls are smarter; both sexes feel that teachers like girls more; both feel teachers would prefer to be around girls more than boys; and both boys and girls feel girls receive more compliments.[19]

Nor did an AAUM explain that all four areas in which the AAUW claimed girls are allegedly shortchanged are contradicted either by their own data or by other research. Let’s start with finding that boys do better in math. Boys score only 5 points higher than girls on the nationwide achievement test scores in math (310 to 305).[20] And more girls than boys take high school classes in algebra and geometry.[21] It is in the choice of math for a profession when girls say, “No thanks – I’d prefer literature” (or foreign languages, art history, or another liberal art). Why that difference in choice?

Boys often choose math for reasons of money, not love. That is, the AAUW did not allow for the possibility that boys choose math or engineering because they know that it will earn them more money than a major in French literature. As girls are watching Princess Di marry a prince, boys are figuring out that majoring in French literature will leave them short by a castle. As girls are figuring out whether they want the option of being financially supported when the children are young, boys in college are figuring out how to do the financial supporting if his wife should want that option.

Women friends of mine who have chosen math also did it for financial reasons. Liz Brookins’ first love was history. When she speaks of history there is a sparkle in her eye. But she had dropped out of college to be married and eventually become a mom to four children. Then she got divorced. When child support did not support the children, she knew she had to return to college. But she also knew a degree in history might leave her unemployed. She didn’t have that luxury. So she asked herself a different question: “What degree will leave me best able to support my family?” The answer was math. Math it was.

It is not that Liz was bad at math; it was that it was not even close to her first love. As it turned out, she became very good at math. She became San Diego County’s math teacher of the year and now teaches at the University of California in San Diego. Now there’s a sparkle in Liz’s eye when she solves an equation!

And that’s the way it is for many men: First, they take care of the family they love; then they try to fall in love with what takes care of their family. When I ask college students what they would prefer to do if they could make equal money doing anything they wish, both sexes are more likely to choose music, art, and the liberal arts over math, engineering, or physics.

If schools and society prepare girls to have their choice more than boys, is it really the girls who are being shortchanged? Certainly girls have scholarship and admissions advantages over boys in math and science. In brief, The AAUW left out discrimination against our sons as one reason boys may be undertaking math.

Second, science. Boys outscore girls on science achievement tests by only 8 points (300 to 292).[22] Unpublicized by the AAUW, though, is the fact that boys score 15 points lower than girls in reading and 17 points lower in writing.[23] Nor is it mentioned that a higher percentage of girls take biology and chemistry classes.[24]

Third, teacher attention. The AAUW commissioned a study finding that both boys and girls were much more likely to feel that girls got called on more than boys and that teachers paid more attention to girls than they did to boys.[25]This research, though, was left out of the AAUW’s public relations report.[26] I checked this out with the two daughters of a womanfriend, Alex and Erin, since they disagree on most everything (they are 11 and 12). This time, though, they agreed: Boys get hollered at more; girls get complimented more.

Fourth, self-esteem. Recent studies of self-esteem find girls and boys to be between one and three percentage points of each other – in either direction. For example, when both boys and girls are asked, “I feel that I am a person of worth, at least on an equal basis with others,” 90% of girls either strongly agree or agree; 89% of boys either strongly agree or agree.[27]

In 1997, Metropolitan Life examined the way boys and girls were treated and concluded that “contrary to the commonly held view that boys are at an advantage over girls in school, girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teachers’ expectations, everyday experiences at school, and interactions in the classroom.”[28] You did not read about this study in the media. And it had virtually no impact on the schools.

The impact of our belief in women-as-minority? It takes The New York Times almost two decades after women are exceeding men in college to acknowledge it in a significant story.[29] When they do, they devote more space to how the gap creates problems for the female students (“There aren’t many guys to date”[30] ) and how it turns men into dominant oppressors (“[the guys] have their pick of so many women that they have a tendency to become players”).[31] In contrast, articles about men being in the majority at the Citadel, or in the armed services, never mention men as victims because they have few women to date.

When The New York Times interviewed students and educators about why the gap exists, they chose answers that justified the gap. For example, “In high school, I always felt women did better and cared more....”[32] Or comments that the men just aren’t interested, or that women tolerate boredom better, or that men feel they can make their way in the military or computer work without degrees.

Contrast this with what we give as reasons for why women used to do worse in math and science. We ask ourselves whether the institutions themselves are doing anything to discourage girls. And the answer is always “yes.” We don’t say that it’s because the women care less, or because men tolerate boredom better, or that many women feel they can make money by marrying money and, therefore, don’t need degrees. The difference in attitude leads us to offer special scholarship opportunities only to girls, and for the government to create Girl Power programs....

To the credit of The New York Times, the following week they did devote six sentences to the ways in which boys lose out to girls in schools in many ways, but then immediately justified doing so out of racial concern – that African-American boys are doing worse than any other group.[33]

The Media

“When the media discover a feminist concern, it gets less than five minutes of serious consideration; then comes a five-year attack.”

—Susan Faludi, Newsweek, Oct. 25, 1993[34]

“When it comes to gender issues, journalists generally have suspended all their usual skepticism…. We accept at face value whatever women’s groups say. Why? Because women have sold themselves to us as an oppressed group and any oppressed group gets a free ride in the press…. I don’t blame feminists for telling us half-truths and sometimes even complete fabrications. I do blame my colleagues in the press for forgetting their skepticism.”

—Bernard Goldberg, CBS News correspondent[35]

The media contain some of the world’s most talented and hard working people. The media work under deadlines that would be my nightmares. As for ratings, a prime time TV show must find an audience of 25-million; a book can make a good profit with an audience of 25-thousand, making my concern for “ratings” one-tenth of one percent of the concern of a prime-time TV show.

The most popular stories, the “biggest” stories – Anita Hill, OJ Simpson, Princess Diana, and Monica – all have one archetypal theme embedded in them: the drama of a male oppressor and a female victim. Here’s the media’s dilemma....

The popularity of this archetype creates ratings. To question this archetype is to undermine the ratings it is the very purpose of the story to create. And it is asking reporters to introspect when deadlines are demanding something commanding in writing, not a work-in-progress in the mind.

When these “big story” elements surface, newspapers, TV news, talk shows and even book publishing are all in unison, each with a unique style, but each with a similar message.  So the examples in this media section often apply to more than the particular media for which I describe it.

The New York Times merits its own section below, because, among the media, it has almost Pied Piper status. First, if you read The New York Times on any given day, you will be able to predict more of what the rest of the media will be covering the rest of the week than if you attend to any other media source in the world. Second, and not coincidentally, there is no significant media source in which feminism has a greater influence on the content and direction of male-female issues than at The New York Times.

Because the media is filled with bright and ambitious people looking for “scoops,” we can get a sense of the power of the instinct to protect women and demonize men when it has left virtually untouched for a quarter century the data on domestic violence against men and particularly the thousands of heart wrenching stories of domestic violence against elderly men, whose real-life stories are in every community. The same can be said for stories of dads fighting to love their children who are told to be wallets first, visitors second; or men who are victims of false accusations, especially during custody battles; or a boy who dies of testicular cancer, or who drops out of school, or a veteran who becomes homeless and dysfunctional....          

The instinct to protect women is powerful enough to keep the media from “scoops” like questioning the belief women are workers and men are shirkers; or the myth of the deadbeat dad. The instinct has directed its focus on the racism of executions and away from the sexism of all-male executions; on sensitivity to dumb blonde jokes more than Bobbitt castration humor ; on making female circumcision in Africa more of an issue than male circumcision in America;  on how Hillary and Princess Diana felt, but not how Bill Clinton or Prince Charles felt; to look at the female tragedies in sex and dating, but not the male’s; and on and on and on.....

Of the four gender perspectives outlined above (feminist; non traditional men; traditional men; traditional women), I would estimate that between 90-95% of the reporters by whom I have been interviewed in the past twenty-five years leaned toward the feminist perspective. About 80% of those feminists are women, so not only is gender politics covered by people from only one gender political party, but by people whose gender reinforces their political ideology. A bit like 90-95% of the reporters covering the Republican and Democratic political conventions doing it from the point of view of the Republicans – or Democrats.

On top of this political and personal bias, the media relies not only on government and academic circles to feed it information, but on opinion polls....

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FOOTNOTES