Copyright ©2001 Massachusetts News, Inc. Photocopying and data processing storage of all or any part of this issue may not be made without prior written consent. 

Soundbites from
The War Against Boys

Prof. Sommers charges that Pollack works with Feminists to make men like women

January 2001

These soundbites from The War Against Boys tell, in Christina Hoff Sommers own words, how Dr. Pollack is deceiving the American public. The headlines are by the staff of The Massachusetts News.

Pollack Is Seeking to Change Men

Like Gilligan and Debold, the practitioners of men’s studies are concerned about bad effects that masculine stereotypes have on the psyches of the nation’s boys. According to William Pollack … and Ronald F. Levant (a Boston University psychologist cofounder of the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity), the reconstructed psychologically healthy boys of the future will be raised without pressures to conform to masculine archetypes: “As we raise the next generation, the boys who will become men in the twenty-first century, we look forward to the time when these boys will be able to safely stay in the ‘doll corner’ as long as they wish without being taunted.…”

The study, entitled “Listening to Boys’ Voices,” was conducted by Dr. William Pollack, codirector of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital and assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

No Evidence for Pollack’s Conclusions

[P]ollack paint[s] a picture of American children as disturbed and in need of rescue. But once one discounts the anecdotal and scientifically ineffectual reports on the inner turmoil of adolescents that have issued from Harvard Graduate School of Education and the McLean Hospital’s Center for Men, there remains no reason to believe that girls or boys are in crisis. Mainstream researchers see no evidence of it. American children, boys as well as girls, are on the whole psychologically sound. They are not isolated, full of despair, or “hiding parts of themselves from the world’s gaze” – no more so, at least, than any other age group in the population.”

One wonders why the irresponsible and baseless claims that girls and boys are psychologically impaired have been so uncritically received by the media and the public.

Pollack Tells Nation That
Boys Are Pathological

Pollack appeared on Opera, 48 hours, CBS This Morning, and Dateline NBC to tell about his research finding that a silent crisis was engulfing American boys. He joined Vice President Al Gore on CNN’s Larry King Live for a program dedicated to understanding school violence. He spoke to principals, counselors, and PTA leaders. In May 1999, for example, he delivered a keynote address to a convention of more than fourteen hundred Texas elementary school counselors seeking to better understand the boys in their care. In June, he addressed two thousand PTA leaders in Portland, Oregon.

Referring to boys as “Ophelia’s brothers,” Pollack did for boys what Gilligan and Mary Pipher had done for girls: he brought news of diminished and damaged lives to a large public.

Pollack Is Talking About ‘Normal’ Boys

We must bear in mind that Pollack is not talking about a small percentage of boys that are seriously disturbed and lethally dangerous. He is attributing pathology to normal boys, and his conclusions are expansive and alarming. “These findings,” he said, “carry massive implications for what appears to be a larger national crisis, one we are now seeing can occasion serious violence.” This national emergency called for serious social reform: “The time has come to change the way boys are raised – in our homes, in our schools, and in society.

Pollack Frightened a Lot of People

Pollack’s easy slide from “boys who pick up guns” to “the boy next door” – who, he assures us, is not very different inside – scared a lot of parents. This slide from abnormal boy to normal one is, of course, illegitimate. There is not a shred of evidence in Pollack’s research that justifies his “tip-of-the-iceberg,” “boys are in crisis” hypothesis. Yet, Pollack glibly tossed it into the media echo chamber.

Pollack Contributes to Prejudice Against Boys

Pollack’s explanation for adolescent male violence in schools contributes to the national climate of prejudice against boys. That is surely not his intention. It is, however, an inevitable consequence of his sensationalizing approach to boys, treating healthy boys as if they were abnormal, lethally violent boys as “the extreme end of the large pattern”

Pollack Puts Boys on Defensive

Pollack, who wants to rescue boys from the myths of boyhood, unwittingly harms them by arousing public fear, dismay, and suspicion. In characterizing boys as “Hamlets,” he stigmatizes an entire sex and a particular age group. His seemingly benign project of rescuing boys from the “myths of boyhood” by reconnecting them with their nurturers puts pressure on boys to be more like girls. The unintended effect is to put boys on the defensive.

Pollack is Wrong; Male Traits
Should be Encouraged

In fact, the boy reformers such as Polack, Gilligan, and their acolytes need to consider the possibility that the male stoicism and reserve may well be traits to be encouraged, not vices or psychological weaknesses to be overcome.

Pollack Stands in The Way of Improvement

American boys do not need to be rescued. They are not pathological. They are not seething with repressed rage or imprisoned in “straitjackets of masculinity.” American girls are not suffering from a crisis of low self-esteem; they are not being silenced by the culture. The vast majority of girls and boys are psychologically sound. But when it comes to the genuine problems that do threaten our children’s prospects – their moral drift, their cognitive and scholastic deficits – the healers, social reformers, and confidence builders provide no solutions; on the contrary, they exacerbate the problems and stand squarely in the way of what needs to be done to solve them.

Pollack Says His Findings Are Unprecedented

Unlike most scientific papers, which alert readers to their limits, Pollack’s paper was unabashingly extravagant, declaring that, “these findings about boys are unprecedented in the literature of psychology.”

No Research to Support Pollack’s Findings

Pollack had been moved to do his research on boys in great part because of the, “startling findings” of Gilligan and others on girls, which had awakened “our nation … from its gender slumbers,” alerting us to “the plight of adolescent girls lacking for voice and a coherent sense of self … many sinking into a depressive joyless existence.” Except for Pollack’s adulatory references to Carol Gilligan and Nancy Chodorow for their “profound insights,” the manuscript contains not a single footnote referencing other research. Its conclusion, which reports on a “national crisis” centering on boys, was based on a battery of vaguely described tests administered to 150 boys. Pollack gave no explanation of how the boys had been selected or whether they constitute anything like a representative sample.

Pollack’s pronouncements on the psychic condition of America’s boy’s were grim. But even if we disregard the limitations of the database, his research came nowhere near supporting a finding of a “silent crisis” national in scope. On several of the tests he and his group administered, most of the boys showed themselves to be healthy and well adjusted. A self-esteem test found them confident. The Beck’s Depression Inventory, a widely used psychological assessment tool, uncovered “little or no clinical depression.” In private interviews, the boys said they were close to their families, and enjoyed strong friendships with both males and females. Something called the “Kings & King’s Sex Role Egalitarian Scale” found the vast majority of them agreeing that “there should be equal pay for work,” “men should share in housework,” and “men should express their feelings.”

Pollack, however, repeatedly warns readers not to be fooled by such seemingly encouraging results. By interviewing boys and giving them tests that measure “unconscious attitudes,” he claims to have found a truer picture, one of forlorn, alienated, and unconfident boys: “The results of this study of ‘normal’ everyday boys were deeply disturbing. They showed that while the boys on the surface pretend to be doing ‘fine,’ beneath the outward bravado – what I have called the ‘mask of masculinity’ – many of our sons are in crisis.”

Harvard Says They Did It To Get Publicity

While this response may indicate some confusion among today’s young men about right and wrong, nothing in it suggests any kind of psychological disorder. Pollack’s reaction tells us more about his own limitations as a reliable guide to the nature of boys than it does about what boys are really like.

In sum, Pollack’s paper does not present a single persuasive piece of evidence for a national boy crisis. I do not know whether “Listening to Boy’s Voices” has been submitted for publication in a professional journal. Its sparse data and its strident and implausible conclusions render it unpublishable as a scholarly article.

Why did a research institute such as McLean give what amounts to a seal of approval to such dubious research? The press release speaks of “findings” and “correlations” and gives readers the impression that “Listening to Boys’ Voices” is a study that meets McLean/Harvard standards for the responsible, data-backed research. McLean requires investigators to submit research projects to a twelve-member International Review Board for approval. According to Gena Murphy, a member of this board, approval is granted “on the basis of the study’s scientific merit.”

Pollack’s study, with its outsized claims and lack of evidence, could hardly have been approved and the basis of scientific merit. How did it get past the board? In conversations with psychiatrists, I learned that because of managed care, hospitals, administrators, and staff are continuously looking for ways to generate revenue and publicity for their institutions. Members of the McLean Institutional Board might have decided that an attention grabbing “boys are in crisis” study produced by McLean’s center for Men, which Pollack also co directs, would bring favorable attention to the hospital. If so, this scientific merit, usually indispensable for a McLean study, may have been compromised.

I asked Dr. Bruce Cohen, chief psychiatrist a McLean, how Pollack’s “research” had managed to receive McLean’s endorsement and was told, “I prefer not to talk about it at this time.” Had he read Pollack’s study? I asked. “I don’t read every study that comes out of McLean,” he answered. I explained that this study was quite unusual. Pollack claims to have uncovered a national crisis; his findings are “unprecedented in the literature of research psychology.” Surely, that must have come to Dr. Cohen’s notice. I asked how it was that, without having reviewed Pollack’s evidence, McLean had issued a press release giving Pollack’s work the cachet of genuine science. Cohen told me someone would get back with me. But before he hung up I asked for his opinion “as a clinician” of Pollack’s description of the nation’s boys as “young Hamlets who succumb to an inner state of Denmark.” “That’s in there?” he asked, in the worried tone of a high school principal inquiring about what seniors have put in the yearbook.

The next day, I received a call from Roberta Shaw, director of public relations at McLean. She explained that the decision to issue a press release had been based on the “news value” of the study. “We ask ourselves, ‘Is it public interest?’” She also assured me that Pollack “had several journals interested in publishing his study.” She didn’t know what they were. She suggested I call him directly. I did, but he never returned the call.