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REEDINGS .
. .
Notes on
Books by Gerard Reed
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“Facts
do no cease to exist because they are ignored,” Aldous Huxley wisely noted,
and the facts differentiating the sexes must no longer be ignored, says
Stephen Rhoads in Taking Sex Differences
Seriously (San Francisco: Encounter
Books, 2004). Rhoads, a professor
at the University of Virginia, takes sex differences seriously because he
takes research seriously and finds overwhelming evidence “that sex
differences are large, deeply rooted and consequential” (p. 4). From preferred forms of humor to risk-taking, from
physical strength to social needs, from competitive athletics to social
support groups, the two sexes radically differ.
Yet for nearly half-a-century, as a pronounced part of the “sexual
revolution,” influential activists have sought to minimize, if not erase the
differences between the sexes, talking learnedly about “genders” as “culturally
determined” or mere matters of personal choice.
.
This is perhaps most clearly evident in athletics, which are far more
important to boys than girls. “One
study of fourth and sixth graders showed that during free play, boys are
competing with other boys 50 percent of the time whereas girls compete against
each other only 1 percent of the time” (p. 168).
In the nation’s high schools and colleges, “girls outnumber boys in
almost every extracurricular activity” except sports (p. 186). Sports help society, for they are one of the few activities
that help harness boys’ innately aggressive tendencies. Boys socialize mainly through athletics, and they need “sports
more than girls do because boys have more difficulty than girls in making
friends” (p. 183).
But since 1972
the heavy hand of the federal government has sought to level the playing field
for both sexes. Consequently,
over 20,000 “spots for male athletes disappeared” in university programs,
and more than 350 men’s teams were jettisoned to make way for female
athletes. Thousands of men would
like to voluntarily participate in varsity athletics, whereas women must often
be enticed (through scholarships) to join a team.
Women are markedly less interested in competitive athletics, and fans
decidedly prefer to watch men’s teams.
At the University of Virginia, where Rhoads teaches, “97 percent of
total ticket revenues come from sales for men’s games, and 3 percent from
sales for women’s games” (p. 164).
Nevertheless, “gender equality” in athletics (though not, one must
note, in music or drama departments, much less in scholarships for women’s
studies programs!) has been part of the “sexual revolution” for 40 years.
Rhoads attributes the success of the sexual revolution to three things:
1) the birth control pill, that made sex primarily “recreational”
rather than “procreative;” 2) the counterculture of the ‘60s, with its
mantras of “if it feels good, do it” and “make love, not war”; and 3)
the successful feminist movement. Whatever
its intent, however, Sally Cline says it is better labeled “the Genital
Appropriation Era” and what it “’actually permitted was more access to
women’s bodies by more men; what it actually achieved was not a great deal
of liberation for women but a great deal of legitimacy for male promiscuity;
what it actually passed on to women was the male fragmentation of emotion from
body’” (p. 97).
Though a
majority of women still hope to find a husband in college, “hooking up”
has replaced dating on campus, and even dating rarely leads to marriage. Though widely practiced, however, “hooking up” inevitably
harms women. It’s not an equal
opportunity activity! “The most
sexually active women were just as likely as other women to think about love,
commitment and marriage with the men they slept with.
Sexually active men thought less about love, commitment and marriage as
they had more casual sex. The men’s
feelings about casual sex were often very positive. The women’s were more often negative” (p. 106).
The men who enjoy promiscuous sex, however, generally disdain promiscuous women
as possible wives! “Of single
men age 25 to 33, 74 percent agree that if they meet someone they want a
long-term relationship with, they try to postpone sex” (p. 122).
All too many unmarried women, still cohabitating their 30s, find
themselves “‘acting like a wife’ while their partners are ‘acting like
a boyfriend’” (p. 119). It’s hardly surprising, then, that “since the sexual
revolution began, women have been thinking worse of men” (p. 118).
Indeed, there’s lots of “rage” toward them.
Men, for many women, are “jerks.”
The sexual
revolution also ignited the egalitarian dogma of culturally constructed “genders,”
equally capable of rearing children. Ignoring
sexual differences, as do those who promote “androgynous parenting,”
involves little more than believing one’s fantasies.
Staunch feminists, such as Joyce Carol Oates and Kate Millet,
determined to abolish patriarchy, have insisted that “gender” is a human
construct and “gender differences” are quite superficial.
Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg declared:
“Motherly love ain’t everything it has been cracked up to be” (p.
17). Men pretend that women are
better mothers, she says, simply because they want to escape the demanding
work of child care. More
radically, Susan Okin, reflecting the typical academic feminist’s longing
for a “just future,” envisions a world wherein “one’s sex would have
no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”
Male and female distinctions would disappear, and both men and women
would do domestic chores equally well.
Such views,
though advanced by “researchers” in the ‘70s, can no longer be honestly
maintained. Women and men really
are different. Women, for
example, actually enjoy being with babies and toddlers more than men. “Cross-nationally, girls show more interest in babies and
are preferred as babysitters. Neither
Israeli kibbutzim nor U.S. communes have had any success in abolishing such
sex roles, although many have made doing so their highest priority” (p. 26).
And babies—by a margin of “fourteen to one”—prefer being with
their mothers rather than their fathers (p. 11).
“Young children, moreover, are quick to self-segregate by sex” (p.
25). Like water flowing through
the Grand Canyon, the sexes simply conform to the “patriarchal”
stereotypes disdained by feminists. In truth, says Alice Eagly, women really “’do ‘tend to
manifest behaviors that can be described as socially sensitive, friendly, and
concerned with others’ welfare” (p. 18).
They “find special pleasure in small groups of women—a preference
that gives them practice at establishing intimate friendships” (p. 204).
Men, conversely,
“tend to manifest behaviors that can be described as dominant, controlling
and independent’” (p. 18). Men
everywhere “want to ‘drive the car, pick the topic, run the war’” (p.
151). Boys forever fight and
refuse to listen to girls (p. 154). So
too (once grown-up) men “hate to be dominated.
Men attempt to climb workplace hierarchies in part because of their
strong desire for a job with no close supervision” (p. 151).
In the judgment of Anne Campbell, “Deep inside, men are always on
their own against the world’” (p. 184).
That’s the way it is—and perhaps the way it should be! Men also desire physically attractive women, for “researchers
found that feminine beauty affects a man’s brain at a very primal level—similar
to what a hungry man gets from a meal or an addict gets from a fix” (p. 59).
Like it or not, women are forever in a beauty contest, competing for
men’s attention. Women, by contrast, find men’s physical stature and
financial accomplishments more alluring.
They want to “look up to” their husbands, both physically (wanting
someone six inches taller) and intellectually.
Universally, women value a mate’s financial resources more highly
than do men. Men often prefer
women who earn less than they do, but women almost never do.
Strangely enough, “highly paid professional women have an even
stronger preference for high-earning men than do women working in less
well-paid jobs” (p. 63).
Fathers are
important not only as breadwinners, however; they are necessary for a child’s
well being, especially serving as disciplinarians and “guides to the outside
world” (p. 80). Fatherless
children suffer. They have
significantly more developmental problems and die more frequently.
“Swedish boys in single-parent families are four times as likely to
develop a narcotics-related disease, and girls are three times as likely”
(p. 80). The pain of losing a
father through divorce is powerfully expressed by Jonetta Rose Barras, in Whatever
Happened to Daddy’s Little Girl?: “’A
abandoned by the first man in her life forever entertains powerful feelings of
being unworthy or incapable of receiving any man’s love.
Even when she receives love from another, she is constantly and
intensely fearful of losing it. This
is the anxiety, the pain, of losing one’s father’” (p. 94).
Mothers, of
course, are as important as fathers, and women instinctively “dream of
motherhood” (p. 190). Germaine
Greer published an influential manifesto, The
Female Eunuch, in 1970 that mocked motherhood.
“Now, thirty years later, she says she is ‘desperate for a baby. .
. . She mourns her unborn babies
. . . and [has] pregnancy dreams, waiting with vast joy and confidence for
something that will never happen’” (p. 205).
Today’s young women, frequently ingesting feminists’ formulae for
the “good life,” choose to make careers primary, but they routinely lament
their barrenness when they reach their 40s.
Lugging a leather briefcase to a lush office proves to be a poor
substitute for a baby at one’s breast.
Giving birth to a baby profoundly changes most women, who discover a
mysterious and joyous bond between themselves and their young.
Naomi Wolf, once pregnant, recorded that “the hormones of pregnancy”
so changed her that she had to “question my entire belief system about ‘the
social construction of gender’” (p. 205).
Greer and Wolf,
however, no longer represent feminism. Rather
than acknowledge the research that challenges their prejudices, most feminists
reject it. They angrily denounce
it, without citing evidence, as biased and anti-woman.
Gloria Allred labels such research “harmful and dangerous” (p. 19).
Femnist, deeply imbedded in publishing houses, promote school textbooks
that celebrate atypical women, actually giving “more attention to Maria
Mitchell, a nineteenth century astronomer who discovered a comet, than to
Albert Einstein” (p. 40). Scholars (many of them women) who dare question feminist
claims face disrespectful audiences and personal attacks, and they have
difficulty finding publishers for their research.
What seems
clear, Rhoads says, is that there are “two kinds of females, one kind of
male” (p. 29). Men,
universally, see themselves as protectors and providers.
Women seem to divide (perhaps in accord with their testosterone levels)
into semi-masculine and fully feminine groups.
Strong feminists, Rhoads suggests, embody the competitive, aggressive
traits of men. Many of them—Gloria
Steinem, Kate Millett, Simone de Beauvoir—never married.
“A disproportionate number of female business executives were
athletes in school” (p. 173). Thus
the only segment of women in America with a majority identifying themselves as
“feminists” is a tiny cadre “making more than $100,000 a year” (p.
35). These powerful women, when
pregnant, often “‘see the body as an imperfect tool that the more perfect
self should control. They tend to
experience pregnancy and birth as unpleasant because they are so out of
control.’” They cannot
understand homebirthers, who “see themselves as ‘actively growing the baby’”
in their wombs. Rather, “’see
the baby as a separate entity,’ a ‘foreign body growing inside my body’”
(p. 36). So naturally they
cannot understand the clear majority of women who want to be home with their
kids, who appreciate traditional husbands who protect and provide.
Yet, Rhoads
concludes, these traditional men and women are the ones who find life most
satisfying. Women really do find
joy in rearing children and homemaking. Men
really thrive when they can succeed in work and thereby support a family.
Taking sex differences seriously explains why this is so.
Everyone concerned with marriage and family, with the health of young
people, should take seriously Rhoads’ research.
As the distinguished Rutgers University professor of anthropology
Lionel Tiger says: “The Empress
of Androgyny has no clothes. Steven
Rhoads provides a responsible, clear, exhaustive and convincing description of
human six differences and what they mean for social policy and personal life.
While members of the academy rush to consume ‘natural’ foods and
protect ‘nature,’ they simultaneously ignore and even avoid ‘human
nature,’ especially in the sexual sphere where political intensity is
greatest. Rhoads offers a
generous-minded but hard-headed corrective to ideological fatuities and
concernocrat assertions that have polluted the intellectual air.
And his scholarship is as punctilious as his writing is efficient”
(book jacket).
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* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* * * * *
Mary Eberstadt’s
Home-Alone America:
The Hidden Toll of Day Care, Behavioral Drugs, and Other Parent
Substitutes (New York: Sentinel, c. 2004), adds a journalist’s perspective to
Rhoad’s more scholarly treatise. Though
she is a research fellow at the Hoover Institute, and provides both footnotes
and bibliography to document her case, she writes for a general audience and
addresses “one of the fundamental changes of our time:
the ongoing, massive, and historically unprecedented experiment in
family-child separation in which the United States and most other advanced
societies are now engaged” (p. xiii). As
the book’s subtitle indicates, she argues, courting controversy, that we
simply must fill homes with adults who rightly nurture children.
In a chapter
devoted to day care, markedly similar to a chapter in Rhoads’ treatise,
Eberstadt notes that it is necessary because 70% of the mothers with children
under age six were working. However
necessary for moms who lack other options, day care harms kids.
Child care advocates, especially those who promote universal,
governmentally-funded child care, are sadly misguided.
“In sum,” she insists, “the real trouble with day care is
twofold: One, it increases the
likelihood that kids will be unhappy, and two, the chronic rationalization of
that unhappiness renders adults less sensitive to children’s needs and
demands in any form” (p. 19). Rather
than “overparenting” or excessive maternalism—portrayed by “separatonists”
as harmful to children—kids need parents who are continually present,
constantly involved in their activities.
When they’re
not, they face the “furious child problem.”
Shooters in our schools most clearly illustrate it.
But less lethal forms of savagery—“feral behavior,” Eberstadt
calls it—have markedly increased and generally develop in “stressed,
single parent homes,” where children spend little time with the only adults
capable of inculcating academic and social skills.
Careful studies, taking into account “differences in family income
and in parental education, marital status, and total hours worked, the
more hours parents are away from home after
school and in the evening, the more likely their children are to test in the
bottom quartile on achievement tests [emphasis added]” (p. 37).
The same goes
for physical and mental fitness. “Fit
parents, fat kids” describes the U.S. While
“boomers” embrace vegetarianism and haunt health clubs, their kids (at
home alone) veg-out on chips and soda while playing video games.
Between 1960 and 2000, “the percentage of overweight children and
teenagers tripled” (p. 41). Too little breast-feeding, too much TV, too little exercise,
too few family meals, too much fast-food grazing.
In sum: “Today’s child fat problem is largely the result of adults not being
there to supervise what kids eat” (p. 54). Mental disorders and suicides have soared.
Depression, autism, learning disabilities, ADD all point to troubled
children. Yet Eberstadt wonders
whether much of this may simply be “a legitimate emotional response to the
disappearance from children’s lives of protecting related adults?” (p.
78).
Rather than stay home with their kids, parents increasingly rely on
psychiatric drugs to keep them pacified.
In one decade (1987-1996) the number of kids taking such drugs tripled.
Prozac eases girls’ depression; Ritalin curbs boys’ exuberance.
Psychologists dispense prescriptions rather than probe the hidden hurts
in kids’ hearts. Parents
and teachers who ban even pictures of guns from school routinely endorse
mind-altering drugs such as Ritalin. A
significant number of school shooters, such as Kip Kinkel in Oregon and Eric
Harris in Colorado, were taking prescribed drugs.
Ritalin has been widely prescribed and now thrives on an underground
black market as kids with prescriptions turn dealers with their surplus pills. Angry musicians, including Kurt Cobain and Eminem, loudly
lamented being placed on Ritalin as children.
Eberstadt fears that “children and teenagers are increasingly treated
with performance-enhancing drugs not only to help them compete, but also to
relieve the stresses that their long, out-of-home, institutionalized days add
to the adults around them, the teachers, parents, and other authorities” (p.
102).
She believes this, in part, because of “the primal scream of teenage
music,” perhaps the most disturbing chapter in the book. Older folks (like myself) who can’t stand the music and
simply hope it goes away should carefully heed Eberstadt’s analysis of it.
Digging beneath the profanity and violence of rap music, Eberstadt
argues that “if yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is
that of abandonment” (p. 106).
The lyrics of Pearl Jam, Kurt Cobain, Eminem et
al. rail against “the
damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and
(especially) absent fathers” (p. 106).
Tupar Shakur, a violent rapper gunned down in his 20s in Las Vegas, was
“a boy who ‘had to play catch by myself,’ who prays:
‘Please send me a pops before
puberty’” (p. 114). Eminem’s
songs emphasize “the crypto-traditional notion that children need parents
and that not having them has made all hell break loose” (p. 117).
In a song written for a movie he made, Eminem “studies his little
sister as she colors one picture after another of an imagined nuclear family,
failing to understand that ‘momma’s got a new man.’
‘Wish I could be the daddy that neither of us had,’ he comments”
(p. 117). Though their parents
don’t want to admit it, kids buying Eminem’s albums by the millions
generally crave the Ozzie and Harriet homes of the ‘50s.
For one thing, kids in the ‘50s were free from the “ravages of ‘responsible’
teenage sex” that now devastates our young people. STDs run rampant, thanks to absent parents and the “safe
sex’ mantra of “sex educators.” Five
of the ten most frequently reported diseases in modern America are STDs.
Parents and teachers who are paranoid about smoking tobacco tolerate
and even encourage far more lethal experimentation with sex.
But “if tobacco were doing to teenage girls’ lungs what intercourse
and oral sex are now doing to their ovaries and other female organs, there
would be no more adult talk of ‘safe sex’ than there is talk of ‘safe
cigarettes.’ The difference is
that one can always stop smoking, whereas some of the STDs are for keeps”
(p. 140). Kids are now “sexually
active,” it’s clear. And
empty homes, with both parents working from dawn to dark, provide perfect
places for teenage trysts—91% taking place there after school.
Sex abuse also
escalates when parents aren’t around. Men
rarely abuse their biological children. A
British psychiatrist, Theodore Dalrymple, declares: “’He who says single parenthood and easy divorce says
child sexual abuse’” (p. 137). Another
scholar, David Blankenhorn, notes that 86 percent of child abusers “were
known to the family, but were someone other than the child’s father” (p.
137). “In the statistics on
teenage STDs lurks one of the saddest stories in this book,” says Eberstadt. “Here is a clear-cut example that laissez-faire parenting
has caused real harm to millions of teenagers, most seriously the girls whose
bodies now carry viruses latent with short- and long-term problems—everything
from infertility to increased risks of various cancers.
Many of them do not even know what they have, and neither do their
happy-talk parents who continue on in their unenlightened happy-talk way—responsibly
buying their responsible adolescents birth control, all the while clinging to
ideological reassurances about ‘responsible’ teenage sex” (p. 138).
In conclusion, Eberstadt says
we need less day care and “more parent-child separation but, rather, the
adoption of a higher standard that acknowledges what has too long gone
unacknowledged: the benefits of increasing the number of intact
adult-supervised homes”
(p. 172).