War Against Boys

War Against Boys: Fact or Fiction

One of the oldest debates in psychology is the nature versus nurture debate. Its roots extend far beyond the nineteenth century psychologists such as Freud and Skinner into the beginnings of scientific thought. Even Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and Plato addressed the issue of how personality is formed. Today, a relative consensus has been reached that nature and nurture work in tangent with one another; one can have many biological possibilities of which the environment determines the development. In any area involving gender however, this debate is still strong.

In the War Against Boys: How misguided feminism is harming our young men, Christina Hoff Sommers points out that some feminists still support the nurture side of the debate without acknowledging any possibility of a biological influence. Sommers insists on examining the growing number of studies indicating that gender differences are not all socialized but are biological sex differences, just as differences in physiology between the sexes are biologically based. However, in her efforts to show how misguided feminism has become in its search for gender equality, Sommers takes the other extreme of the debate and discounts any differences formed during socialization. Although literature for the biological explanation of gender construction is growing, one cannot discount the environmental influences as Sommers does.

A Biological Explanation

If there is one aspect of research in sex differences to which Sommers does justice, it is the research supporting the differing biology of males and females. She convincingly summarizes the evidence for the biological influence in a clear, concise manner.

First, she addresses the cognitive abilities with which a large difference has been shown to favor males or females. Males are on the whole superior to females in visuospatial abilities, especially mental rotation tasks (Halpern, 1992). In fact, Sommers doesn’t mention this, but the effect size found in this area of sex differences is one of the largest that psychologists study in any field with an effect size of d=0.9 (Halpern, 1992). While not the best at visuospatial skills, females are superior in their verbal skills especially “writing, retrieval from long-term memory, and verbal articulation tasks” (Halpern, 1992). These cognitive differences do not suppose a cause however. They could arise not from biology, but from socialization as the feminists argue.

To prove a biological cause is implicated, Sommers has to draw on research that connects biology such as hormones or structural differences to related behaviors and preferences.