Conversation

Defining Masculinity

The following six texts comment directly or indirectly on definitions and images
of masculinity in today’s society:
Sources
1. Leonard McCombe, Marlboro Man (photo)
2. Paul Theroux, Being a Man
3. Gretel Ehrlich, About Men
4. Rebecca Walker, Putting Down the Gun
5. Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky, Why Johnny Won’t Read
6. David Brooks, Mind over Muscle

After you have read, studied, and synthesized these pieces, enter the conversation
by responding to one of the prompts on page 580.

1. Marlboro Man
Leonard McCombe
This iconic photograph, taken by Leonard McCombe, was used by the Philip
Morris Company to transform Marlboro cigarettes from the feminine appeal of
being “Mild as May” to a more rugged image that appealed to men. When this
campaign began in 1955, sales were at $5 billion; by 1957, they had jumped
to $20 billion despite growing health concerns over cigarettes. McCombe took
this photo of Clarence Hailey Young, a ranch foreman in Texas, in 1949.

Questions
1. How does the composition of the photograph contribute to its effect? Why is the focus
exclusively on the face rather than a longer shot that would include the entire body?
2. What is the effect of the subject’s gaze not meeting the eyes of the viewer?
3. Life magazine assigned McCombe to do a story that dispelled the glamorous image
of cowboys seen in Hollywood movies of the period and, instead, documented the
hardworking life of ranchers. What stereotypes about cowboys or the West does the
photo exploit — or combat?
4. Why do you think that this photo caught the eye of legendary advertising executive
Leo Burnett as a good choice for his campaign to transform the image of Marlboro
cigarettes?

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 CONVERSATION 567

2. Being a Man
Paul Theroux
In the following essay, part of the collection Sunrise with Seamonsters (1985),
novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux examines society’s views of masculinity.

There is a pathetic sentence in the chapter “Fetishism” in Dr. Norman Cameron’s

book Personality Development and Psychopathology. It goes, “Fetishists are nearly
always men; and their commonest fetish is a woman’s shoe.” I cannot read that sen-
tence without thinking that it is just one more awful thing about being a man —
and perhaps it is an important thing to know about us.
I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is
pitiful, in my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an
ill-fitting coat for one’s entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppres-
sive sense of nakedness). Even the expression “Be a man!” strikes me as insulting

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 568 CHAPTER 8 • GENDER

and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling, obedient, soldierly and stop think-
ing. Man means “manly” — how can one think about men without considering
the terrible ambition of manliness? And yet it is part of every man’s life. It is a
hideous and crippling lie; it not only insists on difference and connives at superi-
ority, it is also by its very nature destructive — emotionally damaging and socially
harmful.
The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal
is effectively separated from women and he spends the rest of his life finding
women a riddle and a nuisance. Of course, there is a female version of this male
affliction. It begins with mothers encouraging little girls to say (to other adults)
“Do you like my new dress?” In a sense, little girls are traditionally urged to please
adults with a kind of coquettishness, while boys are enjoined to behave like monkeys
towards each other. The nine-year-old coquette proceeds to become womanish in
a subtle power game in which she learns to be sexually indispensable, socially
decorative and always alert to a man’s sense of inadequacy.
Femininity — being lady-like — implies needing a man as witness and seducer;
but masculinity celebrates the exclusive company of men. That is why it is so gro-
tesque; and that is also why there is no manliness without inadequacy — because it
denies men the natural friendship of women.
It is very hard to imagine any concept of manliness that does not belittle women, 5
and it begins very early. At an age when I wanted to meet girls — let’s say the treach-
erous years of thirteen to sixteen — I was told to take up a sport, get more fresh
air, join the Boy Scouts, and I was urged not to read so much. It was the 1950s and
if you asked too many questions about sex you were sent to camp — boy’s camp,
of course: the nightmare. Nothing is more unnatural or prison-like than a boy’s
camp, but if it were not for them we would have no Elks’ Lodges, no pool rooms,
no boxing matches, no Marines.
And perhaps no sports as we know them. Everyone is aware of how few in
number are the athletes who behave like gentlemen. Just as high school basketball
teaches you how to be a poor loser, the manly attitude towards sports seems to be
little more than a recipe for creating bad marriages, social misfits, moral degener-
ates, sadists, latent rapists and just plain louts. I regard high school sports as a drug
far worse than marijuana, and it is the reason that the average tennis champion,
say, is a pathetic oaf.
Any objective study would find the quest for manliness essentially right-wing,
puritanical, cowardly, neurotic and fueled largely by a fear of women. It is also
certainly philistine. There is no book-hater like a Little League coach. But indeed
all the creative arts are obnoxious to the manly ideal, because at their best the arts
are pursued by uncompetitive and essentially solitary people. It makes it very hard
for a creative youngster, for any boy who expresses the desire to be alone seems to
be saying that there is something wrong with him.
It ought to be clear by now that I have something of an objection to the way we
turn boys into men. It does not surprise me that when the President of the United

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 CONVERSATION 569

States [George W. Bush] has his customary weekend off he dresses like a cowboy —
it is both a measure of his insecurity and his willingness to please. In many ways,
American culture does little more for a man than prepare him for modeling
clothes in the L. L. Bean catalogue. I take this as a personal insult because for many
years I found it impossible to admit to myself that I wanted to be a writer. It was
my guilty secret, because being a writer was incompatible with being a man.
There are people who might deny this, but that is because the American writer,
typically, has been so at pains to prove his manliness that we have come to see
literariness and manliness as mingled qualities. But first there was a fear that writ-
ing was not a manly profession — indeed, not a profession at all. (The paradox in
American letters is that it has always been easier for a woman to write and for a
man to be published.) Growing up, I had thought of sports as wasteful and humili-
ating, and the idea of manliness was a bore. My wanting to become a writer was
not a flight from that oppressive role-playing, but I quickly saw that it was at odds
with it. Everything in stereotyped manliness goes against the life of the mind. The
Hemingway personality is too tedious to go into here, and in any case his exertions
are well-known, but certainly it was not until this aberrant behavior was exam-
ined by feminists in the 1960s that any male writer dared question the pugnacity
in Hemingway’s fiction. All the bullfighting and arm wrestling and elephant shoot-
ing diminished Hemingway as a writer, but it is consistent with a prevailing atti-
tude in American writing: one cannot be a male writer without first proving that
one is a man.
It is normal in America for a man to be dismissive or even somewhat apolo- 10
getic about being a writer. Various factors make it easier. There is a heartiness about
journalism that makes it acceptable — journalism is the manliest form of Ameri-
can writing and, therefore, the profession the most independent-minded women
seek (yes, it is an illusion, but that is my point). Fiction-writing is equated with a
kind of dispirited failure and is only manly when it produces wealth — money is
masculinity. So is drinking. Being a drunkard is another assertion, if misplaced,
of manliness. The American male writer is traditionally proud of his heavy drink-
ing. But we are also a very literal-minded people. A man proves his manhood in
America in old-fashioned ways. He kills lions, like Hemingway; or he hunts ducks,
like Nathanael West; or he makes pronouncements like, “A man should carry enough
knife to defend himself with,” as James Jones once said to a Life interviewer. Or he
says he can drink you under the table. But even tiny drunken William Faulkner
loved to mount a horse and go fox hunting, and Jack Kerouac roistered up and down
Manhattan in a lumberjack shirt (and spent every night of The Subterraneans1 with
his mother in Queens). And we are familiar with the lengths to which Norman Mailer 2
is prepared, in his endearing way, to prove that he is just as much a monster as the
next man.

1A 1960 film based on Jack Kerouac’s novel about the lifestyle of 1950s Beats. — Eds.
2An American journalist and novelist. — Eds.

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 570 CHAPTER 8 • GENDER

When the novelist John Irving was revealed as a wrestler, people took him to
be a very serious writer; and even a bubble reputation like Erich (Love Story)
Segal’s was enhanced by the news that he ran the marathon in a respectable time.
How surprised we would be if Joyce Carol Oates were revealed as a sumo wrestler
or Joan Didion active in pumping iron. “Lives in New York City with her three
children” is the typical woman writer’s biographical note, for just as the male writer
must prove he has achieved a sort of muscular manhood, the woman writer — or
rather her publicists — must prove her motherhood.
There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not generally accepted
that to be a man is somehow — even now in feminist-influenced America — a
privilege. It is on the contrary an unmerciful and punishing burden. Being a man
is bad enough; being manly is appalling (in this sense, women’s lib has done much
more for men than for women). It is the sinister silliness of men’s fashions, and a
clubby attitude in the arts. It is the subversion of good students. It is the so-called
“Dress Code” of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Boston, and it is the institutionalized
cheating in college sports. It is the most primitive insecurity.
And this is also why men often object to feminism but are afraid to explain
why: of course women have a justified grievance, but most men believe — and with
reason — that their lives are just as bad.

Questions
1. Much of this essay consists of negative descriptions of what it means to Paul
Theroux to be masculine or a man. Why does he offer such strong images and
assertions?
2. Do you agree or disagree with Theroux when he writes, “It is very hard to imagine
any concept of manliness that does not belittle women, and it begins very early”
(para. 5)? Explain.
3. How does Theroux prepare his readers for the turn the essay takes in paragraph 12
when he says, “There would be no point in saying any of this if it were not gener-
ally accepted that to be a man is somehow — even now in feminist-influenced
America — a privilege”? What does this statement reveal about Theroux’s overall
purpose in this piece?
4. Theroux’s essay was written in 1983. Which of his points are outdated? Which
ones do you think remain true today?

3. About Men
Gretel Ehrlich
In the following essay from The Solace of Open Spaces (1984), author and
documentary filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich compares the popular view of the cow-
boy with her own experiences.

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 CONVERSATION 571

When I’m in New York but feeling lonely for Wyoming I look for the Marlboro
ads in the subway. What I’m aching to see is horseflesh, the glint of a spur, a line
of distant mountains, brimming creeks, and a reminder of the ranchers and cow-
boys I’ve ridden with for the last eight years. But the men I see in those posters
with their stern, humorless looks remind me of no one I know here. In our hell-
bent earnestness to romanticize the cowboy we’ve ironically disesteemed his true
character. If he’s “strong and silent” it’s because there’s probably no one to talk to.
If he “rides away into the sunset” it’s because he’s been on horseback since four in
the morning moving cattle and he’s trying, fifteen hours later, to get home to his
family. If he’s “a rugged individualist” he’s also part of a team: ranch work is team-
work and even the glorified open-range cowboys of the 1880s rode up and down
the Chisholm Trail in the company of twenty or thirty other riders. Instead of the
macho, trigger-happy man our culture has perversely wanted him to be, the cow-
boy is more apt to be convivial, quirky, and softhearted. To be “tough” on a ranch
has nothing to do with conquests and displays of power. More often than not,
circumstances — like the colt he’s riding or an unexpected blizzard — are over-
powering him. It’s not toughness but “toughing it out” that counts. In other words,
this macho, cultural artifact the cowboy has become is simply a man who pos-
sesses resilience, patience, and an instinct for survival. “Cowboys are just like a pile
of rocks — everything happens to them. They get climbed on, kicked, rained and
snowed on, scuffed up by wind. Their job is ‘just to take it,’” one old-timer told me.
A cowboy is someone who loves his work. Since the hours are long — ten to
fifteen hours a day — and the pay is $30 he has to. What’s required of him is an
odd mixture of physical vigor and maternalism. His part of the beef-raising indus-
try is to birth and nurture calves and take care of their mothers. For the most part
his work is done on horseback and in a lifetime he sees and comes to know more
animals than people. The iconic myth surrounding him is built on American
notions of heroism: the index of a man’s value as measured in physical courage.
Such ideas have perverted manliness into a self-absorbed race for cheap thrills.
In a rancher’s world, courage has less to do with facing danger than with acting
spontaneously — usually on behalf of an animal or another rider. If a cow is stuck
in a boghole he throws a loop around her neck, takes his dally (a half hitch around
the saddle horn), and pulls her out with horsepower. If a calf is born sick, he may
take her home, warm her in front of the kitchen fire, and massage her legs until
dawn. One friend, whose favorite horse was trying to swim a lake with hobbles
on, dove under water and cut her legs loose with a knife, then swam her to shore,
his arm around her neck lifeguard-style, and saved her from drowning. Because
these incidents are usually linked to someone or something outside himself, the
westerner’s courage is selfless, a form of compassion.
The physical punishment that goes with cowboying is greatly underplayed.
Once fear is dispensed with, the threshold of pain rises to meet the demands of
the job. When Jane Fonda asked Robert Redford (in the film Electric Horseman) if
he was sick as he struggled to his feet one morning, he replied, “No, just bent.” For

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 572 CHAPTER 8 • GENDER

once the movies had it right. The cowboys I was sitting with laughed in agree-
ment. Cowboys are rarely complainers; they show their stoicism by laughing at
themselves.
If a rancher or cowboy has been thought of as a “man’s man” — laconic, hard-
drinking, inscrutable — there’s almost no place in which the balancing act between
male and female, manliness and femininity, can be more natural. If he’s gruff, hand-
some, and physically fit on the outside, he’s androgynous at the core. Ranchers are
midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once. What
we’ve interpreted as toughness — weathered skin, calloused hands, a squint in the
eye and a growl in the voice — only masks the tenderness inside. “Now don’t go
telling me these lambs are cute,” one rancher warned me the first day I walked into
the football-field-sized lambing sheds. The next thing I knew he was holding a black
lamb. “Ain’t this little rat good-lookin’?”
So many of the men who came to the West were southerners — men looking 5
for work and a new life after the Civil War — that chivalrousness and strict codes
of honor were soon thought of as western traits. There were very few women in
Wyoming during territorial days, so when they did arrive (some as mail-order brides
from places like Philadelphia) there was a stand-offishness between the sexes and
a formality that persists now. Ranchers still tip their hats and say, “Howdy, ma’am”
instead of shaking hands with me.
Even young cowboys are often evasive with women. It’s not that they’re Jekyll
and Hyde creatures — gentle with animals and rough on women — but rather, that
they don’t know how to bring their tenderness into the house and lack the vocabu-
lary to express the complexity of what they feel. Dancing wildly all night becomes a
metaphor for the explosive emotions pent up inside, and when these are, on occa-
sion, released, they’re so battery-charged and potent that one caress of the face or
one “I love you” will peal for a long while.
The geographical vastness and the social isolation here make emotional evo-
lution seem impossible. Those contradictions of the heart between respectability,
logic, and convention on the one hand, and impulse, passion, and intuition on the
other, played out wordlessly against the paradisical beauty of the West, give cow-
boys a wide-eyed but drawn look. Their lips pucker up, not with kisses but with
immutability. They may want to break out, staying up all night with a lover just to
talk, but they don’t know how and can’t imagine what the consequences will be.
Those rare occasions when they do bare themselves result in confusion. “I feel as
if I’d sprained my heart,” one friend told me a month after such a meeting.
My friend Ted Hoagland wrote, “No one is as fragile as a woman but no one
is as fragile as a man.” For all the women here who use “fragileness” to avoid work
or as a sexual ploy, there are men who try to hide theirs, all the while clinging to
an adolescent dependency on women to cook their meals, wash their clothes, and
keep the ranch house warm in winter. But there is true vulnerability in evidence
here. Because these men work with animals, not machines or numbers, because
they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they are confined to a

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 CONVERSATION 573

place and a routine embellished with awesome variables, because calves die in the
arms that pulled others into life, because they go to the mountains as if on a pil-
grimage to find out what makes a herd of elk tick, their strength is also a softness,
their toughness, a rare delicacy.

Questions
1. Gretel Ehrlich opens with a reference to the Marlboro Man (pp. 566–7), a lone and
rugged-looking cowboy who represented Marlboro in its cigarette advertising for
many years. With this reference and her description of the Wyoming landscape,
what effect does she achieve in the first three sentences of her essay?
2. In the first paragraph, Ehrlich claims that by romanticizing the cowboy, we have “dis-
esteemed his true character” (para. 1). How does she define that “true character”?
3. What does Ehrlich mean when she calls the cowboy “an odd mixture of physical
vigor and maternalism” (para. 2)?
4. In paragraphs 5 and 6, Ehrlich analyzes the cowboy’s relationship with women.
How has the cowboy’s history defined the way he interacts with women?
5. How does the paradoxical statement by Ted Hoagland that “[n]o one is as fragile as
a woman but no one is as fragile as a man” (para. 8) distill the points Ehrlich makes
throughout the essay?

4. Putting Down the Gun

Rebecca Walker
In the following excerpt from her introduction to the essay collection What Makes
a Man: 22 Writers Imagine the Future (2004), Rebecca Walker, journalist, activ-
ist, and author of the memoir Black White Jewish, looks at the pressures boys
experience to conform to certain societal expectations.

The idea for this book was born one night after a grueling conversation with my
then eleven-year-old son. He had come home from his progressive middle school
unnaturally quiet and withdrawn, shrugging off my questions of concern with
uncharacteristic irritability. Where was the sunny, chatty boy I dropped off that
morning? What had befallen him in the perilous halls of middle school? I backed
off but kept a close eye on him, watching for clues.
After a big bowl of his favorite pasta, he sat on a sofa in my study and read his
science textbook as I wrote at my desk. We both enjoyed this simple yet profound
togetherness, the two of us focused on our own projects yet palpably connected. As
we worked under the soft glow of paper lanterns, with the heat on high and our
little dog snoring at his feet, my son began to relax. I could feel a shift as he began
to remember, deep in his body, that he was home, that he was safe, that he didn’t
have to brace to protect himself from the expectations of the outside world.

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 574 CHAPTER 8 • GENDER

An hour or so passed like this before he announced that he had a question.

He had morphed back into the child I knew, and was lying down with a colorful
blanket over his legs, using one hand to scratch behind the dog’s ears. “I’ve been
thinking that maybe I should play sports at school.”
“Sports?” I replied with surprise, swiveling around and leaning back in my
chair. “Any sport in mind, or just sports in general?”
A nonchalant shrug. “Maybe softball, I like softball.” 5
I cocked my head to one side. “What brought this on?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe girls will like me if I play sports.”
Excuse me?
My boy is intuitive, smart, and creative beyond belief. At the time he loved
animals, Japanese anime, the rap group Dead Prez, and everything having to do
with snowboarding. He liked to help both of his grandmothers in the garden. He
liked to read science fiction. He liked to climb into bed with me and lay his head
on my chest. He liked to build vast and intricate cities with his Legos, and was
beginning what I thought would be a lifelong love affair with chess.
Maybe girls would like him if he played sports? 10
Call me extreme, but I felt like my brilliant eleven-year-old daughter had come
home and said, “Maybe boys will like me if I stop talking in class.” Or my gregari-
ous African-American son had told me, “Maybe the kids will like me if I act white.”
I tried to stay calm as he illuminated the harsh realities of his sixth grade
social scene. In a nutshell, the girls liked the jocks the best, and sometimes deigned
to give the time of day to the other team, the computer nerds. Since he wasn’t
allowed to play violent computer games — we forbade them in our house — he
was having trouble securing his place with the latter, hence his desire to assume
the identity of the former. When I asked about making friends based on common
interests rather than superficial categories, he got flustered. “You don’t understand,”
he said huffily. “Boys talk about sports, like their matches and who scored what
and stuff, or they talk about new versions of computer games or tricks they learned
to get to higher levels.” Tears welled up in his eyes. “I don’t have anything to talk
about.”
He was right; until that moment I had had no idea, but suddenly the truth of
being a sixth-grade boy in America crystallized before me. My beautiful boy and
every other mother’s beautiful boy had what essentially boiled down to two options:
fight actually in sport, or fight virtually on the computer. Athlete, gladiator, secret
agent, Tomb Raider. The truth of his existence, his many likes and dislikes, none
of them having to do with winning or killing of any kind, had no social currency.
My son could compete and score, perform and win, or be an outcast or worse,
invisible, his unique gifts unnoticed and unharvested, the world around him that
much more impoverished.
That night I went to sleep with several things on my mind: the conversation
I planned to have with the head of my son’s school about the need for a comprehen-
sive, curricular interrogation of the contours of masculinity; the way girls find

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 CONVERSATION 575

themselves drawn to more “traditional” displays of masculinity because they are

more unsure than ever about how to experience their own femininity; and the many
hours and endless creativity I would have to devote to ensuring that my son’s true
self would not be entirely snuffed out by the cultural imperative.
And then there was the final and most chilling thought of all: 15
A bat, a “joy stick.” What’s next, a gun?
It occurred to me that my son was being primed for war, was being prepared
to pick up a gun. The first steps were clear: Tell him that who he is authentically is
not enough; tell him that he will not be loved unless he abandons his own desires
and picks up a tool of competition; tell him that to really be of value he must
stand ready to compete, dominate, and, if necessary, kill, if not actually then vir-
tually, financially, athletically.
If one’s life purpose is obscured by the pressure to conform to a generic type and
other traces of self are ostracized into shadow, then just how difficult is it to pick
up a gun, metaphoric or literal, as a means of self-definition, as a way of securing
what feels like personal power?

Questions
1. Rebecca Walker focuses on her own son as she develops her thesis. Is doing so an
effective strategy to reach her audience? Explain whether the addition of quantitative
evidence would have strengthened or weakened the introduction. As you develop
your response, take into account what you believe Walker’s purpose is.
2. Do you think the pressure Walker’s son was experiencing was simply standard peer
pressure, or do you agree with her that the pressure was tied to gender roles?
Explain.
3. Do you agree with this statement: “My beautiful boy and every other mother’s beau-
tiful boy had what essentially boiled down to two options: fight actually in sport, or
fight virtually on the computer” (para. 13)?
4. What does Walker mean by “the cultural imperative” (para. 14)?
5. Trace the causal links that Walker makes in order to move from the pressure her
son feels to participate in competitive sports to her worry that he “was being primed
for war” (para. 17). Do you find any faulty linkages in her logic? If so, identify and
explain.

5. Why Johnny Won’t Read

Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky
In the following 2005 Washington Post column, Mark Bauerlein and Sandra
Stotsky, researchers involved in the National Endowment for the Arts and the
National Assessment of Educational Progress, examine the reading habits and
preferences of boys.

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 576 CHAPTER 8 • GENDER

When the National Endowment for the Arts last summer [2004] released “Reading
at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” journalists and commentators
were quick to seize on the findings as a troubling index of the state of literary
culture. The survey showed a serious decline in both literary reading and book read-
ing in general by adults of all ages, races, incomes, education levels and regions.
But in all the discussion, one of the more worrisome trends went largely
unnoticed. From 1992 to 2002, the gender gap in reading by young adults wid-
ened considerably. In overall book reading, young women slipped from 63 percent
to 59 percent, while young men plummeted from 55 percent to 43 percent.
Placed in historical perspective, these findings fit with a gap that has existed
in the United States since the spread of mass publishing in the mid-19th century.
But for the gap to have grown so much in so short a time suggests that what was
formerly a moderate difference is fast becoming a decided marker of gender iden-
tity: Girls read; boys don’t.
The significance of the gender gap is echoed in two other recent studies. In
September the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued the “American Time Use Survey,”
a report on how Americans spend their hours, including work, school, sleep and
leisure. The survey found that in their leisure time young men and women both
read only eight minutes per day. But the equality is misleading, because young men
enjoy a full 56 minutes more leisure than young women — approximately six hours
for men and five for women.
The other report, “Trends in Educational Equity of Girls and Women: 2004,” 5
is from the Education Department. Between 1992 and 2002, among high school
seniors, girls lost two points in reading scores and boys six points, leaving a
16-point differential in their averages on tests given by the National Assessment of
Educational Progress. In the fall semester of kindergarten in 1998, on a different
test, girls outperformed boys by 0.9 points. By the spring semester, the difference
had nearly doubled, to 1.6 points.
Although one might expect the schools to be trying hard to make reading
appealing to boys, the K–12 literature curriculum may in fact be contributing to
the problem. It has long been known that there are strong differences between
boys and girls in their literary preferences. According to reading interest surveys,
both boys and girls are unlikely to choose books based on an “issues” approach, and
children are not interested in reading about ways to reform society — or them-
selves. But boys prefer adventure tales, war, sports and historical nonfiction, while
girls prefer stories about personal relationships and fantasy. Moreover, when given
choices, boys do not choose stories that feature girls, while girls frequently select
stories that appeal to boys.
Unfortunately, the textbooks and literature assigned in the elementary grades
do not reflect the dispositions of male students. Few strong and active male role
models can be found as lead characters. Gone are the inspiring biographies of
the most important American presidents, inventors, scientists and entrepreneurs.
No military valor, no high adventure. On the other hand, stories about adventur-
ous and brave women abound. Publishers seem to be more interested in avoiding

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 CONVERSATION 577

“masculine” perspectives or “stereotypes” than in getting boys to like what they

are assigned to read.
At the middle school level, the kind of quality literature that might appeal to
boys has been replaced by Young Adult Literature, that is, easy-to-read, short novels
about teenagers and problems such as drug addiction, teenage pregnancy, alco-
holism, domestic violence, divorced parents and bullying. Older literary fare has
also been replaced by something called “culturally relevant” literature — texts that
appeal to students’ ethnic group identification on the assumption that sharing
the leading character’s ethnicity will motivate them to read.
There is no evidence whatsoever that either of these types of reading fare has
turned boys into lifelong readers or learners. On the contrary, the evidence is accu-
mulating that by the time they go on to high school, boys have lost their interest
in reading about the fictional lives, thoughts and feelings of mature individuals in
works written in high-quality prose, and they are no longer motivated by an excit-
ing plot to persist in the struggle they will have with the vocabulary that goes with it.
Last year the National Assessment Governing Board approved a special study of 10
gender differences in reading as part of its research agenda over the next five years.
The study will examine how differences in theme, the leading character’s gender, and
genre, among other factors, bear upon the relative reading performance of boys and
girls. With its focus on the content of reading rather than process, this study will,
one hopes, give us some ideas on what needs to be done to get boys reading again.

Questions
1. What types of evidence dominate in this essay? Is the purpose of the essay to
inform or to persuade?
2. Do you agree with Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky’s analysis of the literary
preferences of girls and boys? Explain.
3. Taking the opening two paragraphs as the authors’ introduction, how do they cap-
ture their readers’ interest?

6. Mind over Muscle

David Brooks
The following is a 2005 editorial by columnist David Brooks that appeared in
the New York Times.

Once upon a time, it was a man’s world. Men possessed most of the tools one
needed for power and success: muscles, connections, control of the crucial social
institutions.
But then along came the information age to change all that. In the informa-
tion age, education is the gateway to success. And that means this is turning into
a woman’s world, because women are better students than men.

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 578 CHAPTER 8 • GENDER

From the first days of school, girls outperform boys. The gap is sometimes
small, but over time slight advantages accumulate into big ones. In surveys, kin-
dergarten teachers report that girls are more attentive than boys and more persis-
tent at tasks. Through elementary school, girls are less likely to be asked to repeat a
grade. They are much less likely to be diagnosed with a learning disability.
In high school, girls get higher grades in every subject, usually by about a quar-
ter of a point, and have a higher median class rank. They are more likely to take
advanced placement courses and the hardest math courses, and are more likely to be
straight-A students. They have much higher reading and writing scores on national
assessment tests. Boys still enjoy an advantage on math and science tests, but that
gap is smaller and closing.
Girls are much more likely to be involved in the school paper or yearbook, to 5
be elected to student government and to be members of academic clubs. They set
higher goals for their post-high-school career. (This data is all from the Department
of Education.)
The differences become monumental in college. Women are more likely to
enroll in college and they are more likely to have better applications, so now there
are hundreds of schools where the female-male ratio is 60 to 40. About 80 percent
of the majors in public administration, psychology and education are female.
And here’s the most important piece of data: Until 1985 or so, male college gradu-
ates outnumbered female college graduates. But in the mid-80’s, women drew even,
and ever since they have been pulling away at a phenomenal rate.
This year [2005], 133 women will graduate from college for every 100 men.
By decade’s end, according to Department of Education projections, there will be
142 female graduates for every 100 male graduates. Among African-Americans,
there are 200 female grads for every 100 male grads.
The social consequences are bound to be profound. The upside is that by
sheer force of numbers, women will be holding more and more leadership jobs.
On the negative side, they will have a harder and harder time finding marriage-
able men with comparable education levels. One thing is for sure: in 30 years the
notion that we live in an oppressive patriarchy that discriminates against women
will be regarded as a quaint anachronism.
There are debates about why women have thrived and men have faltered.
Some say men are imprisoned by their anti-intellectual machismo. Others say the
educational system has been overly feminized. Boys are asked to sit quietly for hours
at a stretch under conditions where they find it harder to thrive.
But Thomas G. Mortensen of the Pell Institute observes that these same 10
trends — thriving women, faltering men — are observable across the world. In most
countries, and in nearly all developed countries, women are graduating from
high school and college at much higher rates than men. Mortensen writes, “We con-
clude that the issue is far less driven by a nation’s culture than it is by basic differ-
ences between males and females in the modern world.”
In other words, if we want to help boys keep up with girls, we have to have an
honest discussion about innate differences between the sexes. We have to figure

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 CONVERSATION 579

out why poor girls who move to middle-class schools do better, but poor boys who
make the same move often do worse. We have to absorb the obvious lesson of
every airport bookstore, which is that men and women like to read totally differ-
ent sorts of books, and see if we can apply this fact when designing curriculums.
If boys like to read about war and combat, why can’t there be books about combat
on the curriculum?
Would elementary school boys do better if they spent more time outside the
classroom and less time chained to a desk? Or would they thrive more in a rigor-
ous, competitive environment?
For 30 years, attention has focused on feminine equality. During that time
honest discussion of innate differences has been stifled (ask Larry Summers1). It’s
time to look at the other half.

Questions
1. What is David Brooks’s main point in this essay? Why doesn’t he state it directly at
the outset?
2. What is the effect of using the standard fairy-tale opening, “Once upon a time . . .”?
3. Do you agree with Brooks’s cause-effect analysis that in the information age, “this
is turning into a woman’s world” (para. 2)? Why or why not?
4. Do you agree with Brooks that in the near future “women will be holding more
and more leadership jobs” and “will have a harder and harder time finding mar-
riageable men with comparable education levels” (para. 8)? Why or why not?
5. What type of evidence does Brooks cite in order to give his position weight?

Making Connections
1. In what ways does the study reported by Mark Bauerlein and Sandra Stotsky
support or challenge the more personal commentary of Paul Theroux?
2. Would Rebecca Walker likely agree or disagree with David Brooks’s claim that we
need “to have an honest discussion about innate differences between the sexes”
(para. 11)? Why or why not?
3. How does Gretel Ehrlich’s essay reflect or conflict with the image of the Marl-
boro Man?
4. On the face of it, Walker and Theroux seem at odds; yet despite their quite
different perspectives, they share a number of concerns. What are the most
obvious differences? What are the more subtle commonalities?

1Lawrence Summers was president of Harvard University when he claimed that differences in
ability were one reason why women were underrepresented in scientific fields. Summers even-
tually resigned his post. — Eds.

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