>One day last September, there were two back-to-back events in adjacent
>rooms at the Na-tional Press Club in Washington, D.C. "Beyond the ‘Gender
>Wars,’" a symposium organized by the American Association of University
>Women (AAUW), was followed by a rejoinder from the Independent Women’s
>Forum (IWF), "The XY Files: The Truth Is Out There
About the Differences
>Between Boys and Girls." Each event largely followed a predictable script.
>On the AAUW side, there was verbiage about "gender, race, and class" and
>hand-wringing about the "conservative backlash"; despite an occasional nod
>to innate sex differences, "gender equity" was pointedly defined as "equal
>outcomes." On the IWF side, there were affirmations of vive la différence
>and warnings about the perils of trying to engineer androgyny; despite some
>acknowledgment that there are not only differences between the sexes but
>much overlap, the old-fashioned wisdom about men and women was treated as
>timeless truth. And yet both discussions shared one major theme: the
>suddenly hot issue of boys—to be more specific, boys as the victimized sex
>in American education and culture
Well, every conference needs a theme. Reckon feminism is the best place to go right now for quality thinking about gender - and there is shit happening to and within boys right now that feminists seem in a better position to diagnose and treat than anyone else. I don't think we need read into this that there's an implicit 'well, that's girls fixed' subtext, at all (if that's what you're thinking).
Anyway, sex and gender is hard - no matter how confident people sound about these things, it always seems to me we're still groping in the proverbial on this stuff.
Cheers, Rob.