Boys Just Wanna Have Fun

In keeping with the new gender-war hysteria (this time around, women 1, men 0) about boys not keeping up with girls academically, the New York Times is going all out with a series. With big photos, the piece by Tamar Lewen was packed with anecdotes about boys playing lots of computer games, becoming sexual predators on campuses with too great a gender imbalance, and preferring to hit the football fields and not the books. One guy even botched his laundry:

"There was so much freedom when I got here (to college), compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo. I didin't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."

Crisis! What should we do with young men who can't manage to figure out alarm clocks and the cold cycle? Where are we, as a nation?

Well, turns out, the guys of our nation are actually doing just fine (except for non-whites, and that is not an issue of gender, but class). First off, Ivy Leagues still have more boys than girls in their classes. Phew! The traditional gender inbalance is alive and well in the most selective colleges. (Can the New York Times look at that next, please? Since our presidents come from Yale, not State U.)

And in the workforce, despite these little detours in college where women are stealing all the academic honors they deserve from, maybe, not playing Halo, and not playing dumb, women still lose out in the end because of biology (and not all of these so-called gender differences that the author worked so mightily to insist there exist). As Lewen finally notes in the third to last paragraph of this piece that spreads over two entire newspaper pages:

Still, men in the work force have always done better in pay and promotions, in part because they tend to work longer hours, and have fewer career interruptions than women, who bear the children and most of the responsibility for raising them.

But, by the way, raising kids who grow up to get sucked into computer games and not know how to do laundry -- we have ways of making moms feel they've failed at parenthood, too.

As New York Times guest columnist Judith Warner noted recently in an excellent op-ed "What boy crisis?" that Lewen would be advised to read, she points out that boys are doing better than ever. But girls, well, they are on fire.

And while this may be disingenuous, and not exactly the point of the series -- although I'm not sure why not -- can we at least take a moment, a moment people -- to say girls: you go!