Quotes from Christina Hoff Sommers

Boy's natural play is rough and tumble play, it's the universal play of little boys. And it's very different from aggression. And we are a society that's failing to understand the distinction.

A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.

That is the corrosive paradox of gender feminism's misandrist stance: no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men.

Truth brought to public light recruits the best of us to work for change. On the other hand, even the best-intentioned "noble lie" ultimately discredits the finest of causes.

Here are young women with more opportunities, more liberties than almost any women in history and at that moment we tell them they're short-changed silenced victims of a patriarchy? It's defeatist and demoralising.

We are turning against boys and forgetting a simple truth: that the energy, competitiveness, and corporal daring of normal, decent males is responsible for much of what is right in the world.

But what is hard to understand is why the math and science gap launched a massive movement on behalf of girls, and yet a much larger gap in reading, writing, and school engagement created no comparable effort for boys.

Children need to be moral more than they need to be in touch with their feelings. They need to be well educated more than they need classroom self-esteem exercises and support groups. Nor are they improved by having their femininity or masculinity "reinvented." Emotional fixes are not the answer. Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.

Perhaps in the pursuit of happiness, men and women take somewhat different paths. And, isn't it more than a little patronizing to suggest that most....women are not free? They're not self-determining human beings?

As our schools become more feelings centered, risk averse, competition-free, and sedentary, they move further and further from the characteristic sensibilities of boys.

It has never been shown that "high self-esteem" is a good trait for students to possess. Meanwhile, researchers have uncovered a worrisome correlation between inflated self-esteem and juvenile delinquency. As Brad Bushman, an Iowa State University psychologist, explains, "If kids develop unrealistic opinions of themselves and those views are rejected by others, the kids are potentially dangerous.

If asked to make a drawing, little girls almost always create scenes with at least one person, while males nearly always draw things—cars, rockets, or trucks.

Truth is on the side of compassion.

But being a boy is not a social disease.

Boys today bear the burden of several powerful cultural trends: a therapeutic approach to education that valorizes feelings and denigrates competition and risk, zero-tolerance policies that punish normal antics of young males, and a gender equity movement that views masculinity as predatory. Natural male exuberance is no longer tolerated.

The vast majority of American boys and girls are psychologically healthy. On the other hand, there is strong evidence that they are morally and academically undernourished.

Genuine self-esteem comes with pride in achievement, which is the fruit of disciplined effort.

The current plight of boys and young men is, in fact, a women's issue. Those boys are our sons; they are the people with whom our daughters will build a future. If our boys are in trouble, so are we all. In the war against boys, as in all wars, the first casualty is truth.

Girls are more academically powerful. They make the grades, they run the student activities, they are the valedictorians.

I think it's ill-advised to attribute pathologies to healthy people. It doesn't help normal, healthy, thriving children to be viewed as pitiable and fragile.

We must have moral education in the schools, anti-bullying programs, but this does not mean programs to feminize boys.

A fair and just society offers equality of opportunity to all. But it cannot promise, and should not try to enforce, sameness.