My first reaction to Kathleen Parker’s new book was, great title and cover photo. The title, Save the Males, sits atop a male wading in the ocean. Clever. Then I realized it was a culture wars book.

Parker finds great meaning in boy-bashing T-shirts, refights the Murphy Brown battle over whether single motherhood is ok, uses famous cutter Lorena Bobbitt as a stand-in for the feminist movement and worries that men are being replaced by a turkey baster and mail-order sperm. (Actually, I shouldn’t scoff at this. I’m writing this post on a plane trip from Denver to Portland, and I overhead the young woman in the window seat tell her mother: “If don’t get married in the next two years I’m going to a sperm bank.)

Parker takes great offense at the Vagina Monologue productions and really tees off on women in the military. I’m still a little uncertain how allowing women in the military leads to the demise of men, but Parker’s pretty sure about this.

Everything you need to know about the book gets nicely summed up in the conclusion:

As long as men feel marginalized by the women whose favors and approval they seek, as long as they are alienated from their children and treated as criminals by family courts, as long as they are disrespected by a culture that no longer values masculinity tied to honor, and as long as boys are bereft of strong fathers and our young men and women wage sexual war, then we risk cultural suicide.”

Wow, cultural suicide. Never realized I was living so close to the Kool Aid abyss. I need to stock up on canned tuna and rice.

What saves the book is Parker’s writing talent, honed from column writing. Never a dull moment. What I found most troubling about the book was the “notes” section where she reveals the sources of her material. Flip through the notes pages and you’ll find a very long list of culture war kitsch, much of it aimed at feminists.

Thus, Parker picks up the culture battle first launched a decade ago by Christina Hoff Sommers, who blamed feminists for the boy troubles in her book, The War Against Boys. Sommers did a great job proving that boys, not girls, were the ones suffering in school. But she badly misfired by blaming feminism (a misstep she conceded in a phone interview with me after agreeing that boys are falling behind in countries that have never seen a feminist movement).

Here’s what happens when you mistakenly blame feminists: They fight back. And they’re good it at. The American Association of University Women recently hoodwinked the national press with its “research” report describing the boy troubles as a myth. The teachers’ unions take their intellectual cues from groups such as the AAUW, which leads to a deadlock: Our own teachers don’t believe boys are in trouble, despite the blatant data showing otherwise.

Contrary to what Parker writes, men aren’t having problems because of Murphy Brown or Lorena Bobbitt (well, in her case, there’s one guy who serves as an exception). They’re having problems because they emerge less than full formed from high school, unready for either college or the workplace. Schools, not feminism, are the problem, and suggesting otherwise only delays the school reforms needed to correct the problems.

Ok, Parker would have written this in a far funnier way, but that doesn’t make her right.

 

 

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