Book Reviews

Free Thought on Religion, the Church, and National Happiness, by Bernard Mandeville. Transaction Publishers, 2001, hard cover, 234 pp. $49.95.

      A Dutchman, and a physician, Mandeville migrated to England when he was twenty-three and spent the rest of his life there. He lived at a time of religious intolerance that forbad Catholics, and Protestants not of the Church of England, from worship services. The attempt was made to remove Catholics from public office.
      Mandeville was a severe critic of the clergy because they were no different from corrupt politicians. They loved the organization of their structures, pursued place from ambition, wanted to lord it over others, were greedy for possessions, and were capable of advancing their causes even with shocking crimes.
      Men are sometimes misled by outward forms of devotion because they might think that, because they go through the forms, they become godly. Belief is easy; but one perhaps is only obedient to authority. Man's true beliefs can be observed by what he does.

Christians are not bad for want of faith, or wishing to be good, but because they are not able to overcome their appetites and curb their passions, or rather have not resolution enough to set about and persevere in the attempt of it.

To render sermons profitable to us, we should try to banish from our hearts envy, jealousy, and revenge, and have a disposition to peace.

True religion is to diligently labor at the amendment of his own life and never attack others . . . before he has made a conquest of himself.

This is a scholarly book and relevant to our times.

-Angus MacDonald

      The War Against Boys-How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, by Christina Hoff Sommers. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2000, ISBN: 0-684-84956-9, 251 pp., $25.

       Christina Hoff Sommers, Ph.D., has also written Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. She now brings to our attention some serious misguided plans to "reconstruct boyhood" that are being promoted by several organizations, including the Department of Education, the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the Public Education Network (PEN), and the Ms. Foundation for Women.
      Sommers gives us the background for the feminization of boys starting in 1990, when Carol Gilligan announced to the world that America's adolescent girls were in a crisis. She subjects Gilligan's research on girls and boys to extensive analysis and finds it less than scientific and effectively dispenses with the myth of the "Fragile Girl." Mary Pipher calls American society a "girl-poisoning" and "girl-destroying culture." Pipher informs her readers in Reviving Ophelia that her clinic is filled with girls "who have tried to kill themselves." Sommers recites the CDC suicide statistics to show that it's boys who are committing suicide, increasing at three times the rate of girls. In a population of nine million 10- to l4-year-old girls, an absolute increase of 13 is not evidence of a "girl-destroying culture." The AAUW spent $100,000 on a study of "How Schools Shortchange Girls" and then $150,000 promoting it to an uncritical and enthusiastic media. Susan Chira's report of this for The New York Times was headlined "Bias Against Girls Is Found Rife in Schools, with Lasting Damage." The author contacted Ms. Chira and asked if she would write it the same way today. She responded that she would not have, since we now have learned so much about boys' deficits.
      Although The New York Times eventually retracted the story, by then the damage, including a Gender Equity in Education Act in 1994, was already done. What the author sees as bizarre is that this came about right at the time that girls had just overtaken boys in honor societies, student newspapers, debating clubs, and in almost every area except sports; and women's groups are targeting the sports gap with a vengeance. Sommers says it was like calling a wedding a funeral. As girls were succeeding so well and a feminist society declared their War Against Boys, the new misplaced emphasis mushroomed.
      MetLife funded a study which contradicted most of the PEN as well as the AAUW findings. They found that girls are more likely than boys to see themselves as college bound, more likely than boys to want a good education, and boys generally feel that teachers do not listen to what they have to say. Sommers feels this should have been good news at this PEN conference, but the media did not publish it. When a Washington, DC, school teacher at the conference mentioned that "it's a big occasion when a guy gets into an honor society or wins an award," no one commented. Nancy Leffert, a child psychologist at the Search Institute in Minneapolis, reported the results of her massive survey of more than 99,000 sixth- through twelfth-graders. She reported that girls were ahead of boys in thirty-four of forty assets! On almost every significant measure of well-being, girls had the better of boys: they felt closer to their families, they had higher aspirations and a stronger connection to school-even superior assertiveness skills. She concluded by saying that in the past she had referred to girls as fragile or vulnerable, "but if you look at our survey, it tells me that girls have very powerful assets."
      Sommers also enlightens us to the extent that the Department of Education is trying to re-socialize boys in the direction of femininity, while the Supreme Court has legitimized discrimination against boys. Some schools are eliminating the game of tag as a precursor to stalking, portraying every boy as a potential rapist. Sommer alleges that cancelling recess in school to prevent boys from being rowdy may have the opposite effect.
      Remember the headlines in 1996, when six-year-old Jonathan Prevette kissed his female classmate and was punished as a sexual harasser? Or the mother in Worcester, Massachusetts who came to pickup her three-year-old son and was told he had been reprimanded and made to sit in the "time-out chair" for having hugged another child? "He's a toucher," she was told. "We are not going to put up with it." This book points out that the gender gap has been closed. There is no need to punish boys in our schools for being normal boys. They need our help in catching up with girls.

      Dr. Meyer is a pulmonologist practicing in Sacramento and is on the editorial boards of Sacramento Medicine, and California Physician. He is editor & founder of HealthCareCommunication Network, (www.HealthCareCom.net). He can be reached at DelMeyer@DelMeyer.net.