BEFORE TODAY’S MAIN TOPIC, the next live MISCmedia event will be a part of the live event of the litzine Klang. It’s Thursday, 5/18 (20 years after the Big Boom) at the Hopvine Pub, 507 15th Ave. E. on Capitol Hill, starting around 8 p.m. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.
“GIRLS RULE; BOYS DROOL” says a bumper sticker in my neighborhood.
It’s a popular sentiment these days, even among males of a certain “sensitive” pretense.
Now, it’s beinig confirmed, at least in secondary and post-secondary education in North America.
In the May Atlantic Monthly, a female member of a leading conservative think tank cites several research studies from recent years to assert that, contrary to assumptions held in some circles, females are on the whole doing quite better in academic performance and college admission than males, and that this gap’s been getting wider.
I could certainly buy the article’s arguments.
In my own childhood, and later as a secretarial temp in the Seattle schools, it was the girls who consistently dominated the top-math-scorers’ lists, the student governments, the non-athletic scholarships, etc. Non-athletic boys were pretty much stereotyped for life as either troublemakers or geeks; while official and unofficial school programs encouraged girls to strive to become anything they wanted. Adolescent-psychology books and self-help programs in the ’70s and ’80s pretty much ignored the existence of emotional problems or learning difficulties among boys; presuming that all guys always had everything easy.
The emerging new stereotype of boys-in-trouble may have first attracted notice in the inner cities, where early-’90s studies showed some high schools’ graduation rates as up to two-thirds female. Later on, criticisms of gender-specific schemes such as “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” challenged the popular practice of giving girls special attention while expecting boys to fend for themselves.
Now, the Atlantic cover story (following a mini-slew of “saving-our-sons” books last year) has firmly established the new gender-divide concept in the country’s conventional wisdom.
Of course, both the oppressed-girls stereotype and the abandoned-boys stereotype are gross overgeneralizations, which work better as headline fodder in punditry magazines than as schemes to help individual kids.
What would be better for all genders of kids would be to treat them as individuals, with individual strengths and issues, rather than to shove them into the Diagnosis Du Jour.
With the WNBA coming to Seattle later this month, we’re going to get a lot of PR about encouraging girls to be good at sports.
In my ideal school system, it would be OK for a girl to be good at sports. But it would also be OK for a boy to be bad at sports.
TOMORROW: On a similar note, how to be a male feminist without hating yourself.
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