SOURCE: Attarian, John. “Let Boys Be Boys.” World and I 15, no. 10 (October 2000): 238-43.

In the following review, Attarian calls Sommers's The War against Boys a timely, persuasive, and well-argued book.

American girls, mainstream belief has it, are shortchanged by our educational system and socially silenced, while boys are favored. Moreover, our society dragoons boys into a brutalizing model of manhood that forces them to become macho. Hence, boys must be reconstructed to be like girls. Shootings and predatory violence against girls in our schools underscore the need to feminize boys.

In The War against Boys, a well-argued, timely book, former philosophy professor Christina Hoff Sommers, W. H. Brady Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, persuasively shows that the reality is grimly different. Educators are demonizing and discriminating against boys, forcing them to act against their own nature. Americans are turning against boys, Sommers argues, forgetting that normal males'...