War Against Boys
Ariel Ashcraft
Alice Eagly
Psychology of Gender
October 17, 2003
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...
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