Pollack Does Get Around

Pollack Does Get Around

January 2001

Dr. Pollack is having a profound influence on the country. When he drops the name, Harvard Medical School, he commands instant respect.

Besides his many television appearances, he also gives lectures. There are very few professors who use a “speakers bureau” to get them high fees for their lectures as he does – especially the same bureau that represents Mikhail Gorbachev, Larry King, Ralph Nader and others. Most professors do their jobs quietly and without fanfare.

Dr. Pollack pontificates across the entire country. In December 2000, he spoke in Texas and Vermont. In November, he spoke to 500 in New Mexico, plus lectures in California and New Jersey. In Rockford, Illinois, it was reported, “After Pollack’s visit, adjustments were made to the entire system, beginning in kindergarten.” In October, he spoke in Texas, Ohio, Colorado and back to Texas.

In November he was on 20/20 and then did a “live chat” with NBC News about his praise for single mothers. It was reported by NBC this way. “Today, more boys are being raised by single mothers in the United States than in any other country in the world. What impact does the absence of a father have on a boy’s development? Child psychologist Dr. William Pollack says moms can provide much of what a boy needs from his father. ‘Most single moms have excellent instincts about what to say and do to ensure their sons will grow into healthy young men,’ says Pollack in his best-selling book, Real Boys.” Of course, we know that he also says in his book that every child needs two parents.

Although most people look at Pollack as a person with all the answers because he comes from Harvard, there are some who know better. Close to home, Alex Beam wrote in the Boston Globe on October 31, 2000, “The general theme of these books is that boys need to establish ‘emotional literacy,’ break the fetters of suffocating masculinity, ask for directions, blah blah blah. Pollack is by far the most egregious, and the most successful of the boys-to-men consulting crew. He has spoken of ‘a national crisis of boyhood in America….’ More amusingly, he has opined that our boys are ‘young Hamlets who succumb to an inner-state of Denmark.’ This gibberish is intended to establish a connection with Mary Pipher’s million-selling Reviving Ophelia, which frets that young girls will go the way of the benighted princess.”

A major mistake that many inaccurate, liberal reviewers make when comparing Prof. Sommers to Dr. Pollack is when they say that she wants boys to be the “strong silent type.” For example, Time magazine wrote this year that, “Sommers thinks boys should be strong and silent.” And David Abel wrote in the Boston Globe that Sommers “urges society to encourage boys to be stoic, serious and what some would call typically masculine.” But that is not true. They cannot point to anything where she has said or intimated that. She merely wants all boys to be whatever is in their nature, without the feminists trying to alter it to their satisfaction.