Far more adolescent boys than girls commit suicide. To help boys, Sommers argues, we must repudiate the partisanship distorting discussions of sex differences among schoolchildren and objectively, fairly analyze the causes of those differences. But this cannot happen while the divisive pro-girl campaign goes unchecked and unchallenged. The propounders of the manufactured crisis of diminished girls now argue that boys need special efforts to undo society's foisting of violence-promoting masculine stereotypes on them. Specifically, we must feminize boys.
Kids are so malleable.
These assertions, Sommers shows, are wildly inaccurate. Equity promoters also maintain that children are born androgynous and socialized into their gender identities, and that they can be easily molded into another identity to promote equity and social justice. In fact, accumulating empirical evidence discloses that gender differences are largely innate, not learned, and that children's play preferences are mostly determined by hormones. In a disturbing valuation of ideological correctness over truth, feminists pillory scientists researching innate gender differences, try to discourage this research, and deny the validity of its findings. It is obvious, Sommers argues, that feminists have an understandable fear that these findings will be used to restore old, demeaning stereotypes of female inferiority that invoked innate differences to oppress women.