Just posted this (but I’ve also added and moved some stuff for euphony) on http://battlinbog.blog-city.com/read/607125.htm:
It’s so good to see a different side of the gender debate. I was also really interested in the “war against boys” that you link to on your resources. I remember very clearly becoming confused when I first started looking at gender issues many years ago, and rejecting the hatred of men “thing” without being able to articulate what should go in its place.
As a human being I’ve often thought that the alleged “opposites” male and female are not opposites at all; we are the same species and have essentially the same interests. I do hear a lot of women say that men are very different from them but my own experience after one failed and one very successful marriage is that women and men need to talk to each other and also (the hard bit) listen. It’s really that simple, but it’s work and people are very lazy (read: self-centred?) about relationships. That’s where the problems come and then get extrapolated into general distrust based on gender; which is quite ridiculous, really. If you look hard at what your friends of the same gender do they are just as unreliable, devious, kind, inconsiderate, loving etc. etc. but it isn’t treated with the same intensity because sex doesn’t rear it’s intense ugly head and complicate things, giving incidents and accidents of relationships a significance they wouldn’t otherwise have.
I live in the UK and it’s well-known that boys are doing badly but nothing’s being done about it that I can see. My son is 9 and very intelligent but I can see that he, and a lot of his peers, aren’t getting the mental nourishment they should be. This is partly because of the obsession with SAT scores.
Another problem is that we now seem to live in a world of powerless victims, where everybody is a victim of everybody else and nobody is responsible for anything. This is quite bizzare and will hold us (human beings) back until we get over it. It might be a product of 50 years of relative peace – when you look at what my parents’ and grand-parents’ generations had to face a lot of this petty stuff didn’t make it into their lives because mere survival was where they had to put their energy.
I’d like to have a longer chat with you some time. Keep up the good work. I read your open letter and found a lot of interesting food for thought: it’s interesting how changing where you start from allows you to draw totally different, and more balanced, conclusions from the facts. I bet the men-haters don’t like this but they need to think about what you have to say.