SOURCE: Review of The War against Boys, by Christina Hoff Sommers. Virginia Quarterly Review 77, no. 2 (spring 2001): 62-3.

In the following review, the critic calls The War against Boys a startling, convincing, and thought-provoking book.

The assertion that girls have been harmed, and in some cases outright scarred, by an environment of neglect and what could be termed an “anti-girl gender bias” in our schools and in society as a whole has long been accepted as true. Christina Hoff Sommers explodes this notion in her latest book. Exposed as myth and a manipulation of facts contained in pseudo-scientific studies conducted by groups she pejoratively and sarcastically calls, “gender equity experts” and the “gender-bias industry,” she contradicts this belief by saying that it is boys and not girls who have been lagging behind girls for some time in nearly every emotional, socio-economic, and educational criterion. If our cultural and educational...