In Part I of Boys, A Rescue Plan, Michael Gurian introduced the term feminaphobia to help us look at why it is so hard for our culture to grapple with the desperation of many of our boys and men today.  Here in Part II, he explores these issues more deeply.

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Recently I read a list of the essential trainings provided by a national leader in closing achievement gaps, school improvement, and teacher effectiveness.  This list of trainings was considered comprehensive by the agency.

Reading and Literacy

The Teaching Profession

Recruitment and Retention

Curriculum

Special Education

School Climate and Safety

Critical Race Theory

Social Emotional Learning

These are indeed very important topics, but I was struck by the lack of comprehensiveness in the list.  Given that the majority of school issues around teacher effectiveness, closing achievement gaps, and school improvement center around boys’ learning and behavior, why aren’t trainings offered on boys’ learning needs, trainings like “Boys and Girls Learn Differently?” Since these trainings include the needs of girls and gender non-conforming children, there is no discrimination.  Meanwhile, without them, how is a school going to improve in key areas if teachers are not trained in dealing with the population that is under the most educational distress (and has been for decades)–boys?

 

Feminaphobia and Biophobia, the Fear of Nature

 

If you haven’t read “Boys, A Rescue Plan, Part I,” I hope you will go to the News page of www.gurianinstitute.com to read it there.   I ended that essay asking you a number of questions about how boys are faring around you.  Many boys around you will be doing quite well, but I’m sure you’ll also note multiple boys who are gradually lost (or if by suicide, suddenly) from the good life.  We all know more than one struggling boy, yet it is nearly impossible to get help for boys at any kind of structural or systemic way.

I introduced the term feminaphobia in Part I to explore the impossibility (again, please read Part I if you have not yet, on www.gurianinstitute.com/news).  I use “feminaphobia” to denote our personal and cultural fear of feminists and the projected monolith of the feminist/women’s lobby.  Feminaphobia is not misogyny, which is the dislike or hatred of women.  It denotes the way in which leaders are frightened of the women’s lobby and feminist academics; this fear is not normally malicious against boys but, nonetheless, paralyzes our leaders, academics, and schools to such an extent that boys and girls learning differently training is not offered to college students who are being trained to teach our children.  These devoted young teachers enter classrooms and the school system without getting a course in how boys and girls learn differently; they don’t see the male/female learning difference brain scans my GI team and I show in our trainings.  These teachers have populated the school system for decades unarmed to deal with the population that has the most difficulty learning and growing in school.

We also explored the fact that the needs of boys in our systems are barely recognized in part because that lobby utilizes a model for sex and gender that was generated from early feminist service to women:  the oppressor/oppressed model.  This model works well for helping girls and women in some cases, but it is inadequate to help our boys, most of whom are neither oppressors nor oppressed.   Our boys are, however, socially abandoned:  not just in every day development, but also in available social modeling.  Who boys are, what makes them tick, how they think, how they develop a sense of purpose, what kind of mentoring and teaching works best with them, how they attach and bond, how they feel are existential pieces of human nature and development we have systemically neglected in favor of gender political views about “gender stereotypes” and “social norms” and “toxic masculinity.”

Part of the difficulty with feminaphobia is that social leaders who are feminaphobic are often, also, biophobic.  Biophobia is a word used in climate science to denote a disconnection from nature that reduces, sometimes dangerously, our social will to preserve our natural species.  We are afraid of biological environments because we don’t understand how they work (and they seem to threaten us) so we distance ourselves from them.  In that distance, we dominate, control, and exploit them but do not work with them to sustain them in the long term.  Biophobia leads to destruction of the very environment we depend on for life.

In sex and gender science, biophobia is a fear of natural sex (male and female).   Afraid of women, feminists, and the women’s lobby, feminaphobic academics, pundits, and leaders are often the same people who disavow sexual dimorphism.  “There really is no male and female anyway,” they say, or,  “Boys and girls, women and men, moms and dads, that’s old school.  It’s not real.  We choose our gender.”  Gender, which can be identified as fluid, must become the human norm, they say, despite that 1) very few people are gender fluid, and 2) gender does not negate sex.  In social media, a combination of feminaphobia and biophobia has increased the potential success of small numbers of people while erasing success for large numbers of people.   While some girls and LGBTQ individuals might be helped by trying to deny nature, most girls, LGBTQ children, and boys are not helped in our systems.  Because boys are abandoned by our biophobia, male acting out increases, and others suffer in a cycle of suffering that does not end.  

 

What Happens When You Speak Up for both Nature and Boys?

 

Ironically, our abandonment of boy nature in our social systems fits a dissociative social empathy that removes care of the human soul from equitable roots.  I say “ironically” because many people involved in bio- and femina-phobia are involved in both phobias while thinking they are protecting vulnerable populations against discrimination.  They think they are promoting equity but doing so by neglecting one half of our population, males.   When you point out to them, “Uh, wait a minute, where did the value of equality or equity go when you advocate for one group by villifying or abandoning another group?” convoluted answers come back that make little sense  except in a bubble.  This has been going on for decades, as I and others like me know from experience

Thirty two years ago, while publishing my first nonfiction book, The Prince and the King, I used the term “the boy crisis”.  When I did, various people at lectures and book readings heckled me as “patriarchal,” a “good old boy,”  “misogynist,” “anti-feminist,” “white supremacist” (ironic, since I’m Jewish), and many others.   With The Wonder of Boys in 1996, and during the school shootings in the late 1990s, I talked about the boy crisis even more and met, thankfully, various allies in child development who acknowledged the crisis, but each step of the way, the vitriol rose against utilizing biology to study boys and girls in social systems–especially boys.  If you Google me now, you’ll find some unreasonable things said about me along this line, often veiled in other subjects.

Over the decades, Dr. Warren Farrell, co-author of The Boy Crisis (2019), has experienced the same kind of thing, not just personally but collectively when he called myself and others gender experts together to build a bipartisan Coalition to Create a White House Council on Boys and Men.  Asked by the Obama White House to provide research on male distress in America, we provided not only heart-breaking evidence but proven solutions like the Boys and Girls Learn Differently Training, which had already been proven successful in hundreds of schools.   Over a two-year period, four of us functioned as lead authors of what remains to this day the most comprehensive meta-study of American male experience available–34 scholars on our Council provided research you can find at http://whitehouseboysmen.org/the-proposal.

I remember talking with Warren on the phone right after he was supposed to meet with the President in the Oval Office to discuss our study and the possibility of a Commission to help males.   When we spoke, unfortunately, he had just been told there wasn’t time for a presidential meeting, after all; the President had other things to do.  The rebuff of the boy crisis, we learned later, came from political risk the White House felt via Valerie Jarrett and others of offending the women’s lobby.  This is a stark example of feminaphobia:  abandonment of male development is its result.

Just a few years later I got similar treatment.  Flown to D.C. to brief Congress members on the boy crisis, I ended up talking with a few members and staffers, and no positive results for boys came of it.  There was political risk for Congress members in taking on the issues I described.

Soon after that, our Council and Warren lobbied the Trump White House, but without success; then four years later, the Biden White House that had created a White House Gender Policy Council. I remember hearing about this new Council.   “Ah, it’s going to happen!”  Warren, I and others thought.  “This is a ‘Gender’ council, so it has to include males, right?”  When confronted with this question, the White House clarified publicly that its Gender Council would not encompass men.  Feminaphobia and biophobia were both clear in the publicity around the new Council (and still are to this day).  How could the word “gender” be justified, if only one sex was included, we have kept asking, and we are told “gender council” is okay because gender issues are female and LGBTQ/trans issues, not male issues.  Males are dominant and not vulnerable.

Perhaps the closest any boy advocates came to high-level help for boys was the My Brother’s Keeper Initiative out of the White House, for which I and the other advocates lobbied and for which we are grateful.  But even with this innovation, feminaphobia reigned.  President Obama signed into law and funded the White House Council on Girls and Women, but a Boys and Men Council not only could not be signed into law for fear of feminist backlash but even My Brother’s Keeper had to be funded mainly out of government, via calls to foundations and businesses.  The White House feared backlash if government funds were used to focus on boys and men.  To this day, there is no White House, Congressional, or other national council on Boys and Men.  Meanwhile, there are dozens of federal agencies specifically set up and funded by the government to help women and girls.

A father of two daughters, I applaud everything we do nationally and locally for women and girls.  As a girl’s advocate, I have written numerous books on women’s and girls’ empowerment (e.g., The Wonder of Girls, The Minds of Girls, Leadership and the Sexes) and developed successful gender-specific programs on Girls-and-STEM/STEAM, the emotional lives of schools, and recruitment and advancement of women in corporate leadership.  I have also spoken for the United Nations on how to stop violence against women.   I will keep fighting for female empowerment because our daughters carry our civilization in their hearts and on their backs, and they need all our support.  Women’s advocacy, girl’s rights, and indeed feminism itself was never meant to be zero sum.  We must always keep advocating for girls and women.

Meanwhile, the suffering of boys and men–suffering equal to the suffering of girls and women–is difficult to admit culturally or politically because feminaphobia and biophobia simply have too much power in our public discourse.  Governmental and national interventions on behalf of girls and women receive little backlash and cause little or no fear; the thought of helping boys, though, paralyzes leadership and, thus, the whole culture.  One person at a time–and, especially, one leader at a time–we will have to put aside our fear of women and gender feminists, and do so very soon, if we are to save our sons.

 

An Action Plan

 

In Boys, A Rescue Plan, which I will publish in serial form over the course of 2023 – 2024,  I will point out various angles of practical strategy for daily life as well as for advocacy.  While our leadership is paralyzed, I believe our grass roots overwhelmingly knows the need for helping boys as much as we help girls.    My series will answer key questions you and people like you have been asking me since the publication of Saving Our Sons in 2017–answers and ideas you can use to advocate for boys with leaders around you.  Because my research shows seven elements of need among our sons, I have divided the action plan into seven areas of rescue:

 

*Political

*Developmental

*Emotional

*Educational

*Physiological

*Digital

*Spiritual

 

If you know my work, you know I do not take extreme positions.  My arguments and strategies are always science-based; thus, they can fit nearly any individual’s or institution’s fact-gathering, policy making, and action planning.   To read these essays, please go to www.michaelgurian.com/membership/ and subscribe there.  I hope each piece will help you and your community provide holistic arguments and solutions in the grass roots, where we are all working hard to help everyone in need.  From the grass roots, we will need to see a rising upward in the hierarchy until leadership, too, is no longer feminaphobic or biophobic.

I am by nature an optimist.  I believe that we can reveal to our culture its phobia and flaws and get good results.  I believe we can one day convince the frightened, dominant culture that attacks on boys and men comprise a social wrath they do not deserve; even worse, that we push boys and men farther away from all of us, not closer, with our present feminaphobic and biophobic approach.  As cultural messaging tells all of us that males are defective and masculinity is criminal, we leave males one track left–self-loathing.  This was just an academic experiment in the 1960s and 70s but is now, especially with the prevalence of social media, predatory.  We prey on male vulnerability then give the male no greater course to wholeness than the self-loathing.  This is ironic since fifty years ago the forgotten sex was female; now, despite many visible men in government, media, and corporations, the forgotten ones are our boys.  Doubly ironic, by not helping our males–by our fear of backlash and our targeting of males for self-loathing–we are now doing the same shameful, inequitable thing we did in the past, but with the sexes switched.

Let’s do no damage to girls as we mold a boys movement that is in many ways already nascent around us, but still too small—we must make the movement bigger, like we did the girls’ movement in the 90’s and 2000’s.  The job of boy advocacy is a humbling one because its “success” can only be defined in small increments and against powerful odds, but it is a necessary job, and I am honored to do it with you.  Let’s keep meeting and talking together for the sake of all our children.