"Girls Rule!" What your son is seeing about his sex.

I noticed a couple walking with a school-age boy and girl. The boy was wearing a non-descript shirt but the girl was wearing one that said, “Girls Rule!”

That motivated me to do some research on the extent of anti-male versus anti-female products. I summarize what I found in my PsychologyToday.com article today.

A Christmas Story With a Message for Parents

As my PsychologyToday.com article today, I offer a short-short story that while Christmas-themed has implications for parents and their children's education. 

A Particularly Egregious Example of Censorship by the Left

As some of you know, I have been fired, censored, and censured, for speaking what I believe is truth about the unfair treatment of men and boys.

Now my hero in this field, Warren Farrell has suffered a more visible form of such censure. It profoundly saddens me.

I invite you to watch the two videos embedded in THIS article. The first video shows the protest trying to prevent Farrell from making his invited address at the University of Toronto on absolutely dishonest pretenses,wildly distorting, out of context, statements that Farrell previously made.

The second video shows his talk, unedited. Watch even the first few minutes and I think you'll see why he so deserves my respect and why I am so saddened by the growing censorship from the Left that is at least as destructive to society as the McCarthyism from the Right that the Left continues to decry 70 years after it ended.

Is it Too Risky to Advocate for Men and Boys?

I have written much on the terribly unfair--relative to their merit-- treatment of white men and boys.

Just one example: the longevity gap between men and women has increased from just one year in 1920 to 5.2 years now. Yet 95+% of the gender-specific medical research over the last 60 years has been on women's health. There's a federal agency and 39 state agencies on women's health, none on men's.

The Obama Administration has created a powerful White House Council on Women and Girls but rejected our compelling proposal for a White House Council on Boys and Men. Forbes recently did a long article on it.

Perhaps even more frightening are the distortions on race and gender issues. For example, the media and even the president continue to promulgate the misleading statistic that women earn 77 cents on the dollar, when there is solid evidence, for example, THIS, that for the same quantity and quality of work, women earn--depending on the study--only slightly less or slightly more than men. And that when women earn less, while there of course are a few Neanderthal sexists out there, the main reason is not prejudice but the choices women make. For example, see THIS National Academy of Sciences study about why women scientists are "underrepresented."

An easy way to access some of my writings on race and gender is to click on "men's issues" and "race" in the label cloud on the right side of this blog.

The unfairnesses to men and boys are terrible not just for them but for society. My most deeply held belief is that meritocracy is more likely than egalitarianism to yield the greatest long-term good.

But we must know which battles are worth fighting lest we squander the precious little time we are given. As the Serenity Prayer wisely says, "Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Alas, after fighting this fight for two decades now, I'm forced to conclude that the net impact of my efforts to bring merit-based fairness to men and boys has been negative. I have written perhaps 100 articles, op-eds, letters to the editor, and a book, The Silenced Majority, submitting each to 10 or more media outlets and they're almost always rejected. HERE is one reject that particularly disappointed me. Perhaps their being rejected is simply because my work is inferior, although somehow when I write about politically correct matters, my work is routinely published. I'll leave you to judge my work's quality, but certainly my long-sustained efforts seem not to have helped the situation at all. Indeed, white men and boys are, net, treated more unfairly than when I began writing and speaking on the topic. The main effect of my efforts seems to be damage to my career.

So I've concluded, subject to revision, that this is the wrong era to write honestly about race and gender. It seems that today, we can hear only that women and minorities are victims or heroes. And in my judgment, that is unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.

So if you notice that my future writings discuss such issues less or not at all, that's why.

A Major Effort to Get Fair Treatment for Boys and Men

As I have documented often on this blog (click "boys issues" or "men's issues" in the tag cloud on the right side of this blog,) boys and men are struggling far more than are women, yet nearly all governmental efforts are to abet women.

My apologies to regular readers of my blog who have previously read what's in the rest of this paragraph, but my favorite example is this: When women have a deficit, for example, they're "underrepresented" in engineering, massive redress is undertaken. But when men have a deficit, even the ultimate deficit--they die 5.2 years earlier than women--not only is there no redress, there are seven federal offices on women's health, none on men, 39 states have offices of women's health, six for men, and most frightening, over the past 60(!) years, a review of PubMed, which indexes the 3,000 leading medical journals, finds that there are 40 articles on women's health for every one on men's.

In attempt to restore a measure of fairness, I am a member of the Commission to Create a White House Council on Boys to Men.

This article in Forbes makes the case why boys and men need a White House Council, arguably more than we need the already existing White House Council on Women and Girls.

If you ever have the opportunity to ask a legislator why there's a White House Council on Women and Girls but not one on men and boys, that Forbes article will provide all the evidence you need.

The Anti-Male Ethos Accelerates

A car was parked in front of a public school in the San Francisco Bay Area, the epicenter of "gender equity."

The care bore a bumper sticker, Girls Rule, Boys Drool" with a picture of a girl stomping on a face-down boy.

When I got home, I googled, "Girls Rule, Boys Drool" and there were 239,000 results, most of them text and 16,400 images. Here are some I found particularly interesting.

Imagine that you were the parent of a boy. How do you think you'd feel? He'd feel?

Your comments?

Mentor a Bright Boy

Among the most beneficial ways to volunteer is to mentor a bright boy.

Endless programs exist to mentor and otherwise help girls and women, far fewer for boys, even though boys' school and life performance, relative to girls, has so declined in recent decades. For example, in 1980, the ratio of college graduates was 50/50. Now it's approaching 40% male, 60% female.

I advocate helping bright boys rather than boys in general because the public schools are now so focused on helping the lowest achievers that bright kids' great potential is so often being wasted. They're forced to sit stultified and if they can't, they're too often put on a Ritalin leash.

How you mentor can vary. For example, you could do a recreational activity together: build a model, play basketball with him, whatever. In the process, bring up topics that might help him identify interests, reveal problems, come up with questions to ask you. You could meet once a week or once a month, or not meet at all--mentorship by phone and email counts.

To find a bright boy who could use a mentor, contact the counselor at a local school, the gifted child coordinator in your school district, the principal of your church or synagogue's Sunday School, or simply ask your friends or PTA members.

A Double Standard is Destroying Boys

This article makes a strong case for how the public schools have become very unfair to boys. Boys are suffering greatly as a result: decreased achievement, increased dropouts, not to mention increased Ritalin, increased teen suicide. Yet, the media has dismissed pleas for attention to boys as unnecessary. If girls had suffered such a decline, I'd bet a lot of money that the media wouldn't ignore it.

Another Egregious Example of Media Anti-Male Bias

The media breathlessly celebrated a finding by a women's studies professor that said that high school girls now score as well as boys in math. Here are just a few examples: The Associated Press/CNN, New York Times, and National Public Radio.

But the media failed to raise the obvious question: Did girls' achievement occur at boys' expense? That's not an unreasonable possibility given the the tremendous attention having been paid to girls' math education over the past 20 years: teachers being trained to to not call on boys too much, to show role models of females who achieved in math, even to redo the math curriculum to focus on what girls do better: explain things verbally.

So, I asked the study's senior author, Janet Shibley Hyde, the Helen Thompson Woolley Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison that question: 'To what extent did the score gap close because girls' scores went up or because boys' scores went down?" Her response: "We can't really know the answer to your question -- whether it's girls' scores going up or boys' scores going down."

My question to you dear reader, why did not the media ask this question or if they did, fail to report that it's unclear whether boys are being hurt by girls' gains?

An article in City Journal pointed out that the major media's reporting of the story also omitted that while the male and female average math scores were equal, there were many more high-performing boys. That may help explain why more men are scientists. But the media would apparently prefer to leave unexamined its PC belief that sexism is the reason.