Women who seek to be equal to men lack ambition!"" proclaims a sticker on the door of a UW-Madison student's dorm room. Well, perhaps the feminists who adhere to this rally cry of female superiority are getting their way. According to a 2006 Newsweek article, ""Boys across the nation and in every demographic group are falling behind.""
For example, males only make up 44 percent of the university population and perform worse than girls on standardized tests. One can even see evidence of this achievement gap as early as elementary school. As this article points out, ""In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes.""
There are certainly areas of society where women must continue to fight for equality. However, contrary to the message of the above slogan, the goal of feminism should be to create equality where gender differences enrich and strengthen society instead of being a means for discrimination and oppression.
However, as the evidence cited in Newsweek suggests, perhaps we are not becoming a society in which women are equal to men—perhaps the tables are merely turning, and in younger generations, females take more assertive roles while males lag behind.
While feminism has done much to improve the lives of women and society in general, perhaps in the last decades it has increased focus on girls while forgetting boys. While gender roles have expanded for women, gender roles for men have more or less stayed the same.
From a young age, girls receive the message that they can be anything they want to be, whether that's a mother or a CEO. But do young boys receive the same message? For instance, little girls have movies and television shows such as Mulan and Kim Possible teaching them that it is okay to break out of their gender roles and be a warrior or action hero. But there are no Disney movies that show boys spurning society's pressure to be ""manly"" and embracing a life of family and domesticity.
The Newsweek article further suggests that perhaps boys lag behind in academics because, over the past decades, teaching styles have switched from catering to the learning style of boys to the learning style of girls. Moreover, boys don't seem to receive the same kind of encouragement as they used to: As the article states, ""High schools offered boys a rich array of roles in which to exercise leadership skills—class officer, yearbook editor or a place on the debate team.
These days, with the exception of sports, more girls than boys are involved in those activities."" Even worse than being relegated to sports, many boys can now only find outlets through video games, as demonstrated by the rising number of video game addicts.
We must do away with the type of feminism that this slogan represents; the type that wants to get back at men for all their years of female oppression; the type that implies that all men are brutes and degrade women. Feminism should instead work to solve ""the trouble with boys"" by breaking down gender roles of all types, not just the ones that restrain women.
We must remember men as well as women have cultural norms to which they are expected to adhere, such as the roles of the provider and athlete, that they perhaps feel restricted by.
In our schools we should find a method of teaching that is equally accessible to both genders. We must also realize that boys aren't born understanding that they can be anything they want to be, and they need to receive this message just as girls do.
Of course women should not give up the fight for gender equality. But they should do it without demeaning men or leaving them by the wayside.
