Who's Afraid of Carol Gilligan?

http://www.ifeminists.net/introduction/editorials/2006/0208roberts.html ^ | February 8, 2006 | Carey Roberts

[CareyRoberts]

Most feminists will come right out and tell you they pretty much despise men. But some feminists, like the leechers and blood-letters of yore, make the claim that yet another spoonful of feminism will actually make boys and men feel better.

Such is the case of psychologist Carol Gilligan, whose nostrums were recently featured in Newsweek magazine as the cure-all for the Boy Crisis.

For years, the mainstream media has been running cover for Dr. Gilligan, hoping no one would find out the truth. So exactly who is Carol Gilligan, and what is her agenda?

It all goes back to 1982 when Gilligan released her book, In A Different Voice, hailed as “the little book that started a revolution.” The book examined the ways men and women make decisions about right and wrong – what psychologists call “moral reasoning.”

Gilligan concluded that men tended to focus on rules and principles, while women were more swayed by their personal experiences and emotional take of the situation. That common-sense description is hardly earth-shattering -- in my experience, it’s more often men who want to make the rules, and women who try to bend them.

Translated into nine languages and with 600,000 copies sold, In a Different Voice was a huge success.

But the acclaim was not unanimous. The Sisterhood was aghast that Gilligan would even hint that innate differences existed between the sexes. Feminist Linda Kerber ridiculed Gilligan’s book as echoing the “romantic sentimentalism of old voices in the women’s movement.”

Sure enough, Gilligan soon buckled under the weight of the criticism and fell into lock-step with the rad-fem vanguard. But she knew that at some point, she would have to make amends for her revisionist past.

That moment came in 1990, when Gilligan published Making Connections, which was based on her interviews with well-to-do girls attending an upstate New York boarding school. Gilligan reported that at the age of 11, these carefree, confident girls suddenly hit the “wall of Western culture” (read “patriarchy”), and suddenly found themselves voiceless and adrift.

Now really, I have never in my entire life seen a group of adolescent girls who hesitated to speak out on practically anything that crossed their minds. But that’s what Gilligan’s research claimed.

Needless to say, Gilligan never bothered to interview any teenage boys.

Soon Gilligan was regarded with a cult-like veneration. Senator Barbara Mikulski, one of those poor women who had lost her voice, now sang the professor’s praises: “All of us are familiar with Dr. Carol Gilligan and her pioneering work...Dr. Gilligan’s research indicated that women speak in a different voice, but those voices are often made silent by the stereotypes in the dominant culture.”

Thanks to the girl hysteria that Gilligan engendered, the Gender Equity in Education Act was passed in 1994. Of course by that time, girls had surpassed boys on most measures of school performance.

But that didn’t stop Gilligan from receiving the Heinz award from Teresa Heinz Kerry, another one of those silenced women. In 2000, Jane Fonda, her spirit also crushed by patriarchal culture, gushed, “I know what Professor Gilligan writes about. I know it in my skin, in my gut, as well as in my voice.”

So thanks to the GEEA, boys are admonished that tag and dodge ball bring out their latent aggressive tendencies, so better to stick with hop-scotch and jacks. Go to any schoolyard, and you will find that more often it is the voices of boys who have become silenced.

So what is professor Gilligan’s prescription for the Boy Crisis in her recent Newsweek article? [www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10965127/site/newsweek] Because fem-speak is often shrouded in weasel words and loopy logic, as a service to my readers I offer a plain-English translation.

First, Gilligan’s solution for the Boy Crisis involves boys “recognizing their sensitivities, building honest relationships, and strengthening a healthy capacity for resistance.” Translation: More sexual harassment lectures and fewer sports programs.

Then Gilligan warns against “reinstituting traditional codes of manhood, including a return to the patriarchal family.” Read, No need to worry that 40% of American children do not live with their biological fathers, because the Nanny State can do the job better.

But the real message comes out in the sub-title of Gilligan’s fatuous essay: “A feminist scholar explains how the study of girls can teach us about boys.” Meaning: Don’t try to take even a penny of my precious GEEA money away from feminist indoctrination centers, ahem, women’s studies programs.

With the continued feminization of the male species, we can all look forward to seeing the Boy Crisis for a good, long time.

[LibFreeOrDie]

Christina Hoff Sommers has always challenged Gilligan for using anecdotes as the basis for her theories, rather than scientific research. Gilligan refuses to share her original "data" with others.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/sommers.htm

[Chickensoup]

I give women who have studied at the Stone Center a broad berth in my work.

[mumps]

Most feminists will come right out and tell you they pretty much despise men.

Wow! And this assertion is based on what?

Now I understand you probably wanted to start your column with an attention-getting statement. But such a bold declaration, one for which you provide no credible substantiating evidence, is really an insult to readers.

[jwh_Denver]

we can all look forward to seeing the Boy Crisis for a good, long time.

They're making it so no boy is fit to be with a girl so girls will have "no choice" but to be lesbians.

[weeder]

Speak for youself, thinskin.

[iowamark]

[Tzimisce]

I always think it's funny when women want to teach me how to be a man.

Especially when they get pissed when I tell them how to be a woman.

[mumps]

Okay, so I take it that the opening statement didn't insult your intelligence. Ah, well, maybe it's just me. These hyperbolic statements annoy the heck out of me. It's lazy writing, and it's a very weak way to begin arguing one's central thesis. Doesn't it seem that too many of today's political writers don't write to convince the skeptic but to reassure the same-thinking? A skeptical reader is going to challenge that opening line; the same-thinking reader is going to readily accept it. What's the point of being a political writer if you're not going to try to convince the skeptics?

[Intolerant in NJ]

...well-to-do girls attending an upstate New York boarding school. Gilligan reported that at the age of 11, these carefree, confident girls suddenly hit the “wall of Western culture” (read “patriarchy”), and suddenly found themselves voiceless and adrift...did some pilot studies for my dissertation on certain effects of punishment in two Philadelphia schools way back in the '60's - one was a private school with "well-to-do" students, the other an inner-city school with predominantly middle and lower income students...too complicated to go into details, but essentially it was obvious early on that in the private school a mere word or two of disapproval was enough to get most of the kids - boys and girls - to conform to the rules laid down for them (which were established to go against their natural inclinations), while in the other school I well might have had to whup a good number of the kids with a 2x4 to get them to comply...girls did tend to be more agreeable than boys in both schools, but the major difference in conformity and compliance was in the culture and "social class" of the two groups...if Gilligan did in fact deal only with "well-to-do" girls, her study is badly flawed, and any comments based on the study are gibberish, scientifically speaking......