FOR MORE THAN two decades, Carol Gilligan has studied what she considers to be special feminine powers of moral and social understanding—gifts that, she says, our patriarchal society routinely smothers in young girls. In 1994, the best-selling Reviving Ophelia, by Gilligan disciple Mary Pipher, proclaimed a national emergency rooted in a “girl-poisoning culture” that kills the preadolescent female spirit. Now Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994), claims to have discovered that America shortchanges boys, not girls.

The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men

by Christina Hoff Sommers (Simon & Schuster, $26)

Real Boys’ Voices

by William S. Pollack (Random House, $25.95)

Sommers begins The War Against Boys with evidence that girls are more successful in school. She cites studies showing that girls feel more engaged in their classes, get better grades, and more often believe that their teachers listen to their ideas. According to Sommers, the overall SAT scores of boys are higher only because more girls (including low achievers) take the test, motivated by an educational system that favors and encourages them. Instead of worrying about sexist bias in the SATs, she claims we should worry about the low-achieving boys who avoid the test and thus can’t attend college at all. (The Department of Education reports that only 6.7 million men were enrolled in American colleges in 1996 as compared to 8.4 million women.)

Sommers’ most interesting chapters dismiss Gilligan’s lifework as bad science. Apparently, Gilligan drew what were hailed as revolutionary theories about gender from a small pool of data, the details of which she still conceals from public scrutiny. Sommers also gracefully concedes that progirl antisexism has benefited girls in important ways, but persuasively argues that Gilligan-inspired educators have gone too far. Indeed, some teachers create hostile environments in which boys feel blamed for being male and for belonging to a historically oppressive group. But Sommers goes further. She insists that the goal of gender equity in American education has devolved into a nationwide project to rescue boys from their “masculine pathologies.”

TO SUPPORT her idea that educators are systematically and even punitively “feminizing” American males, Sommers paints an anecdotal, extremely one-sided portrait of schools. At one, the rough-and-tumble play of boys at recess is prohibited as “aggression.” At another, a 6-year-old boy who hugged a classmate is punished for harassment. Elsewhere, teachers adorn their classroom walls with pictures of women exclusively or ask boys to role-play famous females and participate in class sewing projects. These last two ideas actually look sensible, but for the most part Sommers chooses to mention only curriculum initiatives and workshops so ridiculous they’d make you laugh if you didn’t know that real human children are being taught by true believers in silly notions.

Ironically, such misguided efforts on the part of educators result from approaches closely resembling Sommers’ own: a quick pinpointing of problems and simple solutions that makes more nuanced, labor-intensive (and thus costly) educational reform seem esoteric or impractical. Sommers recommends all-male classes, strenuous competition for grades, back-to-basics curriculum, and old-fashioned character training—welcome ideas at the conservative American Enterprise Institute where she’s a resident scholar. But if gender wars shouldn’t drive choices in education, neither should right-wing politics, especially when Sommers bases her preference for a new regime of authoritarian lectures and drills at American schools on one main source: “national British proposals” to improve the experiences of schoolboys in England, produced by one conference of headmasters and praised by London newspapers.

SOMMERS IS ELOQUENT on what we love about boys and men, and on the harm that even subtly institutionalized male-bashing can do to young minds. But her argument is tiresomely repetitious, simplistic, and at least as convenient as Gilligan’s in the narrowness of its evidence. Still, Sommers is more readable than William S. Pollack, who became one of her prime “feminizing” targets with his book, Real Boys (1999), a male version of Reviving Ophelia, which urged parents to help their sons verbalize their feelings.

Pollack’s background as a clinical psychologist, professor of psychiatry, and codirector of the Center for Men at McLean Hospital/Harvard Medical Center would naturally predispose him toward talk as a healthy response to life’s challenges. But his new book, Real Boys’ Voices, purports to give us the actual testimony of boys themselves, whom Pollack and his associates interviewed around America. From these interviews, Pollack concludes that social codes have tended to “make boys feel ashamed about expressing weakness” and have produced a “desperate coast-to-coast longing” among them for emotional conversation. Our boys are “cast out to sea in separate lifeboats, and feel they are drowning in isolation, depression, loneliness, and despair.”

Mawkish prose, indeed. But the unvarying motif of stifled cries suggests that a uniform picture of silenced masculinity has been achieved through vigorous editorial airbrushing. A quick comparison of an uncorrected manuscript proof with the edited galleys shows that many passages unrelated to problems or heart-to-heart talk were cut from the boys’ monologues, as if for the purpose of reaching foregone conclusions. Also cut were some hints that games, physical exertion, and just joking around can feel as intimately expressive as earnest dialogue. Various happy contacts between males were pruned, too, streamlining the case Pollack wants to make about masculine isolation. The boys, their pain, and the sterility of their culture may all seem real enough, but these voices don’t.