Chapter 1

The Feminist Mistake



If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me, ye women, if you can.

I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold,

Or all the riches that the East doth hold.

--Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), “To My Dear and Loving Husband”



Relations between the sexes are ailing in our time. Hundreds of prominent men in fields from entertainment to sports to business to politics have been credibly accused of gross sexual harassment and other forms of boorishness. The louts span the political spectrum, from Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes on the right, to Al Franken and John Conyers Jr. on the left. And the toll continues to mount.

Young people hardly date much, but they feel pressured into hooking up. Some millennials are giving up on sex altogether. Eighteen-year-old Noah Patterson, a virgin, told the Washington Post that he preferred online porn to having a girlfriend. “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy.”1

Teenagers and even some preteens “sext” one another, and sometimes find themselves facing child pornography charges.2 The percentage of adults who have never been married is at a historic high (30 percent), and fewer than one-third of millennials say that having a successful marriage is “one of the most important things in life.”3 While many women proclaim themselves “single by choice,” others express frustration with the lack of marriageable men. In 2011, Kate Bolick described the proliferation of commitment-phobic men, which she believed had created a new “dating gap.” Marriage-minded women, she wrote, “are increasingly confronted with either deadbeats or players.”4 The so-called men’s rights movement thrives online, encouraging men to see themselves as victims of the sex wars and to luxuriate in misogyny.

The most talked about cultural products of the past few years only occasionally offer models of nobility or even basic integrity between men and women. They range from rampant adultery (Madmen) to incest and sex slavery (Game of Thrones). In HBO’s Girls, the protagonist’s “boyfriend” in the first few episodes is really not a boyfriend at all but a sex partner--and not a very nice one at that. Hannah drops by Adam’s apartment and is ordered to remove her clothes, to get on all fours, to stop talking, and to perform a variety of sex acts while he indulges the fantasy that she is a child with a “Cabbage Patch lunchbox.”

How did we become so estranged--and so strange? How did love and sex become battlegrounds where feminists decry “rape culture” while the “manosphere” hurls vicious insults at women in general?

Modern feminism, I submit, must take at least some of the blame.

Feminism deserves credit for helping women get the vote, securing equal pay, and obtaining full civil and political rights. Those are unmixed blessings. No reasonable person questions whether women should be treated as full legal equals to men--that is beyond debate. But did that full equality require the denigration of the nuclear family? Did it require the eager embrace of a sexual revolution that would dismantle the traditions of modesty, courtship, and fidelity that have protected women for centuries? Was it essential to declare a war between the sexes, and to deem men the “enemy” of women? Was it necessary to seed our culture with bitterness that continues to this day?

Let’s start at the beginning. It is moving to read the pleas for women’s equality from Mary Wollstonecraft, the eighteenth-century protofeminist, who argued that women could be rational creatures and deserved to be educated. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), Wollstonecraft wrote, “Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.”5

The great British philosopher John Stuart Mill declared in the 1869 that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other--is wrong itself, and is now one of the chief obstacles to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality that doesn’t allow any power or privilege on one side or disability on the other.”6

In his treatise “The Subjection of Women” (1869), Mill scoffed at the notion that women were less intelligent than men (a widely held view at the time) and rebutted those who protested that women had achieved little in the arts and sciences. Mill was scornful: “Our best novelists have mostly been women,” he wrote, mentioning in particular Madame de Staël and George Sand. Of the latter, he wrote that it would be impossible to find “[a] finer specimen of purely artistic excellence than the prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts on the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart.”7

It was fully understandable that women had not achieved excellence in other fields, Mill noted, since they were denied the education men received, and he added that women had original ideas all the time but, lacking the wherewithal to publish or publicly demonstrate their insights, often passed along these ideas to husbands or other male relatives.8 Mill freely acknowledged that “a very large proportion indeed” of his ideas originated with the women in his life.

He also explained women’s comparatively less prodigious production of original works of art by noting that “very few women have time for them. . . . ​Even when the superintending of a household isn’t laborious in other ways, it’s a very heavy burden on the thoughts; it requires incessant vigilance, an eye that catches every detail, and it constantly presents inescapable problems to be solved.”9 Bravo, Mr. Mill. Too few men appreciate this core female competency.

In the intervening centuries, women’s roles have changed dramatically. In our own time, we’ve been encouraged to believe that women’s history is one long tale of exploitation and denigration, oppressions that lifted only when feminism arrived to free us. But this narrative always seemed forced to me. Of course, some men have treated some women badly throughout human history. But declaring that all women have been oppressed by all men seems overly simplistic. Relations between the sexes, starting in families, are too complex to reduce to oppressors and victims.



The First Wave You’ve Never Heard Of

Feminism’s “first wave” is usually dated to the late nineteenth century’s suffrage movement, though some people agitated for equal rights before then. The suffragists are now included in the feminist pantheon. On the evening before the 2016 presidential election, feminists gathered at Susan B. Anthony’s grave, assuming that Hillary Clinton would become the first woman elected president. Anthony has been honored on the U.S. currency, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s home is a National Park Service site. In April 2016, the Treasury Department announced that Stanton, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, and Alice Paul will be featured on the ten-dollar bill to mark the one-hundredth anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment, which enfranchised women coast to coast.

These women may be the ones most often cited in textbooks, but as the American Enterprise Institute’s Christina Hoff Sommers has pointed out, Frances Willard and Hannah More were far more influential and popular with women during the nineteenth century. More (1745–1833), an English novelist, poet, political reformer, and pamphleteer, championed what Sommers calls “maternal feminism.” She didn’t deny differences between the sexes but urged women to use their special abilities to improve the world. Religiously inspired, she founded Sunday schools that taught poor children their ABCs, but also instilled thrift, sobriety, and piety. Her novels and pamphlets excoriated the rich for their amorality, for their hedonism, and for ignoring the needs of the poor.10

Frances Willard, who founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, spoke for many more women than the suffragists. We look back on Prohibition as an idealistic blunder, but women’s intensity about the question indicated that they were more concerned about what excessive drinking was doing to families than they were about the right to vote. As Sommers notes, the National American Woman Suffrage Association had only about seven thousand members, though the WCTU could boast one hundred fifty thousand. The women’s suffrage movement needed help from the WCTU before it could begin scoring political victories. Like More, Willard embraced women’s “separate sphere” while also believing that women had a duty to improve the world. In addition to temperance, the WCTU lobbied for prison reform, child welfare, and care for the disabled.11

The women reformers of that time, unlike those who would lead second-wave feminism some decades later, avoided grievance mongering. They saw women’s issues as being linked to men’s and children’s. Though the temperance movement highlighted the damage excessive alcohol use did to wives and children, it also focused on husbands and sons who drank.

Second-wave feminists, by contrast, would explicitly link women’s struggles with the cause of civil rights for African Americans. In 1963’s The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan declared that “What we need is a political movement, a social movement like that of blacks.”12

In a 1969 piece for New York magazine titled “After Black Power, Women’s Liberation,” Gloria Steinem wrote, “Finally, women [recognized] their essential second-classness, forming women’s caucuses inside the Movement in much the same way Black Power groups had done. And once together[,] they made a lot of discoveries: that they shared more problems with women of different classes, for instance, than they did with men of their own.”13

This is overwrought, particularly when compared to the approach taken by the women leaders of the first wave. The women’s suffrage movement did share roots with the movement for abolition. Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Angelina Emily Grimké, and Sarah Moore Grimké were prominent abolitionists who also campaigned for women’s rights. But suggesting that the condition of women could be compared to that of black slaves or black citizens is a huge leap.

It has become fashionable for various interest groups to hijack the vocabulary and moral standing of the civil rights movement. Women, Latinos, the handicapped, homosexuals, transgender individuals--all have sought to compare their situations with that of blacks. But no group in American history has suffered the kind of dehumanization, persecution, exclusion, terror, and discrimination that blacks were subjected to for more than three hundred years.

Even leaving aside slavery, with its incalculable suffering, African Americans were the victims of thousands of lynchings, systematic torture, discrimination, and abuse. In the years between 1883 and 1927, more than three thousand blacks were lynched.14 As historians Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom note, these crimes were designed to terrorize all African Americans. “They were not usually the furtive work of masked men wearing sheets, as is sometimes thought. Rather they were highly public events; the perpetrators were not only known to the community but sometimes even posed for ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs in the local paper first with their victim and then with their victim’s corpse!”15

Now consider how Steinem described the “oppression” of women in her 1969 article: “[M]ore backstage work, more mimeographing, more secondary role playing around the revolutionary cells and apartment communes. And to be honest, more reluctance to leave the secondary role and lose male approval.”16

Steinem believed women deserved a revolution because “subtler, psychological punishments for stepping out of women’s traditional ‘service’ roles were considerable. (Being called ‘unfeminine,’ ‘a bad mother,’ ‘a castrating bitch,’ to name a traditional few.)”17

Or, as one New York woman complained during a consciousness-raising session in 1969, “I have to keep reminding myself that there’s nothing wrong with body hair, and no reason for one sex to scrape a razor over their legs.”18

Comparing women’s “plight” to what blacks experienced trivialized the true suffering of African Americans, yet feminist-influenced textbooks increasingly stressed this, maintaining that women have been ignored by a “patriarchal,” man-centered history. One widely used women’s studies textbook argued for “radical reconceptualizations” that would “overcome the bias that has been built into what has come to be known as ‘knowledge.’ ” Another insisted that “traditional systems of knowledge have ignored women altogether or frequently portrayed them in stereotypical or demeaning ways.”19

I was educated before this victim narrative took hold, and accordingly, I learned that American history (and world history, for that matter) is brimming with stories of women who were brilliant, brave, righteous, inventive, and worthy of emulation--as well as treacherous, greedy, cruel, lazy, and insipid. I could never escape the suspicion that women were human beings, with all the virtues and vices of the human condition.

But cringing victims bent under the weight of patriarchy? I don’t think so.

American women have been at the forefront of many of our country’s most momentous reform movements. Anne Hutchinson, a charismatic preacher (and mother of fifteen), provoked a schism among Puritans in seventeenth-century Boston. Harriet Beecher Stowe gave abolitionism its greatest weapon in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while Harriet Tubman helped to run the Underground Railroad. As I’ve noted, the temperance movement and Prohibition were primarily the work of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, led by Frances Willard. Dorothea Dix successfully campaigned to reform the treatment of the mentally ill. Mother Jones was an influential labor activist. Mary Baker Eddy founded the Christian Science church, and Ida Tarbell was a crusading Progressive Era journalist. Jane Addams was a pioneer of urban reform. Rosa Parks helped ignite the struggle for civil rights, and Dorothy Day was a leader of the Catholic Worker Movement. Additionally, millions upon millions of unsung women married, bore children (without anesthesia until quite recently), kept households running, ran businesses, took in boarders, and were the anchors of stable and fulfilling family lives.

And every one of the male oppressors who are said to be women’s enemies had a mother, usually a wife, and often sisters and daughters and cousins and aunts and nieces and friends. Those women sometimes made the lives of their men miserable, but more often they made life worth living.

Partout dans le monde, et chez nous aussi, on viole des femmes, on les assassine, on les marie de force, on les lapide, on leur interdit d'aller à l'école, on les dénonce, on les excise, on les répudie, on les prive d'héritage, on leur interdit d'avoir des biens, de l'argent, de sortir dans la rue. Qui l'ignore ? C'est dire que la cause des femmes a du pain sur la planche. Et cependant, Eliane Viennot et Raphaël Haddad voient dans la langue écrite "le dernier bastion de la domination masculine" !
Que gagnent donc les femmes avec l'EI (écriture inclusive) ? Ni George Sand, ni Simone de Beauvoir, ni Anne Sylvestre ne se sont jamais plaintes du masculin générique, et elles n'avaient pas leur langue dans leur poche. L'EI est une confiscation de la langue au profit d'intérêts partisans, qui feint de confondre les mots et les choses, dans cette société qui ne cesse de le faire, comme la publicité masquée sur les t-shirts. Artifice lettré et élitiste, l'EI est une manière de faire diversion, de ne pas affronter les multiples combats des femmes pour leur émancipation et leur conquête interminable de l'égalité.

C'est ainsi que certains militants ont voulu rebaptiser les journées du patrimoine "journées du matrimoine et du patrimoine". Si patrimoine a pu vouloir dire "ensemble des biens, des droits hérités du père" en 1150 où il s'opposait alors à matremoingne, cette distinction juridique est depuis longtemps éteinte. Le mot "patrimoine" a désigné un legs, y compris au sens figuré, avec ou sans référence aux deux parents. C'est bien ainsi qu'il s'applique aujourd'hui au patrimione génétique, patrimoine culturel, patrimoine archéologique, etc. Il est particulièrement ridicule de vouloir réintroduire une distinction de sexe - "journées du matrimoine et du patrimoine" ! - alors que le mot a perdu le trait sémantique "masculin" depuis des siècles et surtout pour l'appliquer à un mot qui ne fait même pas référence à des personnes. Il serait même particulièrement grotesque d'aller chercher un mot qui n'existe plus depuis longtemps pour faire doublon avec un autre mot... afin de désigner exactement la même chose ! Ira-t-on jusqu'à obliger les francophones à ne jamais dire patrimoine sans lui adjoindre sa contrepartie "féminisée" ? On imagine fort bien la scène dans un contexte bancaire : "Parlons de votre matrimoine et de votre patrimoine financier.ère...".
Au fil de leurs transformations, les mots sont porteurs d'histoire comme ils sont porteurs d'oubli. Et surtout, les mots ne revendiquent pas de position idéologique : dire "patrimoine" n'implique pas de prééminence masculine parce que, aujourd'hui, il ne renvoie pas plus au trait "masculin" que patrie ou Patricia qui possèdent la même racine... et qui sont féminins ! A prendre au pied de la lettre toutes les étymologies, on ferait tomber la langue entière sous le coup d'un réformisme insensé.

Le générique masculin serait ainsi une banalité par défaut, une sorte de non-personne, tandis que le féminin signale plutôt une personne spécifique et singulière. Le masculin comme marquage par défaut n'est donc en rien "dominateur" : il serait plutôt trivial, banal, quelconque tandis que c'est le signe féminin qui bénéficie d'un privilège d'exclusivité !

Dans de nombreux contextes, le "masculin" est en réalité générique et indistinct, alors que la marque du féminin introduit la différenciation. La marque du féminin indique qu'un mot n'a plus de valeur générique mais qu'elle concerne alors l'identification de personnes spécifiques. Le masculin est souvent inclusif. Le féminin est toujours exclusif.

Pour un blessé qui se traîne au long des routes, pour un homme que nous ramassons au long des routes, pour un enfant qui traîne au bord des routes, combien la guerre n’en fait-elle pas, des blessés, des malades, et des abandonnés, de malheureuses femmes, et des enfants abandonnés ; et des morts, et tant de malheureux qui perdent leur âme. Ceux qui tuent perdent leur âme parce qu’ils tuent. Et ceux qui sont tués perdent leur âme parce qu’ils sont tués. Ceux qui sont les plus forts, ceux qui tuent perdent leur âme par le meurtre qu’ils font. Et ceux qui sont tués, celui qui est le plus faible, perdent leur âme par le meurtre qu’ils subissent, car se voyant faibles et se voyant meurtris, toujours les mêmes faibles, toujours les mêmes malheureux, toujours les mêmes battus, toujours les mêmes tués, alors les malheureux ils désespèrent de leur salut, car ils désespèrent de la bonté de Dieu. Et ainsi, de quelque côté qu’on se tourne, des deux côtés c’est un jeu où, comment qu’on joue, quoi qu’on joue, c’est toujours le salut qui perd, et c’est toujours la perdition qui gagne. Tout n’est qu’ingratitude, tout n’est que désespoir et que perdition. Un silence. Et le pain éternel. Celui qui manque trop du pain quotidien n’a plus aucun goût au pain éternel, au pain de Jésus-Christ.

The Dubious Virtue of Gender-Neutral Child Rearing

I enrolled in the Ph.D. program in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania way back in September 1980. Governor Ronald Reagan was challenging President Jimmy Carter for the presidency. The original Apple computer had recently come on the market. “My typewriter is working fine” was the answer the department secretary gave me when I asked her whether she would be getting a computer anytime soon. Nobody I knew had ever heard of e-mail or the Internet. The invention of the World Wide Web still lay ten years in the future.

Among the courses I took that fall was a graduate seminar in developmental psychology. “Why do girls and boys behave differently?” my professor, Justin Aronfreed, asked rhetorically. “Because we expect them to. We teach them to. Imagine a world in which we raised girls to play with tanks and trucks, in which we encouraged boys to play with dolls. Imagine a world in which we played rough-and-tumble games with girls while we cuddled and hugged the boys. In such a world, many of the differences we see in how girls and boys behave--maybe even all the differences--would vanish.”

In another seminar my fellow graduate students and I learned about the extraordinary work of Professor John Money at Johns Hopkins. Professor Money had been consulted by the parents of an unfortunate little boy whose penis had literally been sizzled off during a botched circumcision. At Dr. Money’s recommendation, the boy had been raised as a girl, with excellent results (according to Dr. Money). The child loved to play dress-up, enjoyed helping Mom in the kitchen, and disdained “boy toys” such as guns or trucks. “Dr. Money’s work provides further evidence that most of the differences we observe between girls and boys are socially constructed,” Professor Henry Gleitman told us. “We reward children who follow the sex roles we create for them while we penalize or at least fail to reward children who don’t conform. Parents create and reinforce differences between girls and boys.”

We nodded sagely. In clinical rotations we often encountered parents who still clung to the quaint notion that girls and boys were different from birth. But we knew better.

Or so we thought.

I graduated with my Ph.D. in psychology, as well as my M.D., in 1986. When I left Philadelphia to begin my residency in family practice, I got rid of most of the papers I had accumulated during my six years at the University of Pennsylvania. But there was one folder I didn’t throw out: a folder of papers about sex differences in hearing, showing that girls and boys hear differently.

Four years later, after I finished my residency in family medicine, my wife and I established a family practice in Montgomery County, Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. Several years passed. I wasn’t thinking much about gender differences. Then, in the mid-1990s, I began to notice a parade of second- and third-grade boys marching into my office, their parents clutching a note from the school. The notes read: “We’re concerned that Justin [or Carlos or Tyrone] may have attention deficit disorder. Please evaluate.”

In some of these cases I found that what these boys needed wasn’t drugs for ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) but rather a teacher who understood the differences in how girls and boys learn. Upon further inquiry, I found that nobody at the school was aware of girl/boy differences in the ability to hear. I reread the papers in that manila folder, documenting hardwired differences in the ability to hear, showing that the average boy has hearing that is less sensitive than the average girl. In the next chapter we will look more closely at evidence for sex differences in hearing.

Think about the typical second-grade classroom. Imagine Justin, six years old, sitting at the back of the class. The teacher, a woman, is speaking in a tone of voice that seems about right to her. Justin barely hears her. Instead, he’s staring out the window or watching a fly crawl across the ceiling. The teacher notices that Justin isn’t paying attention. Justin is demonstrating a deficit of attention. The teacher may reasonably wonder whether Justin perhaps has attention deficit disorder.

The teacher is absolutely right about Justin showing a deficit of attention. But his attention deficit isn’t due to attention deficit disorder, it’s due to the fact that Justin isn’t hearing the soft-spoken teacher very well. And very few six-year-old boys will raise their hands and say, “Excuse me, Ms. Gentlevoice, I do hear you, but not very well. Could you please speak more loudly?” The teacher is talking in a tone of voice that seems comfortable to her, but some of the boys are zoning out. In some cases we might be able to fix the problem simply by putting the boy in the front row.

“You should write a book, Dr. Sax,” one parent told me. “Write a book so that more teachers know about the differences in how girls and boys hear.”

I allowed myself a patronizing smile. “I’m sure that there must already be such books for teachers, and for parents,” I said.

“There aren’t,” she said.

“I’ll find some for you,” I said.

That conversation took place nearly twenty years ago. Since then I’ve read lots of popular books about differences between girls and boys. And guess what. That mom was right. Not only do most of the books currently in print about girls and boys fail to state the basic facts about innate differences between the sexes, but many of them promote a bizarre form of political correctness, suggesting that it is somehow chauvinistic even to hint that any innate differences exist between female and male. A tenured professor at Brown University published a book in which she claims that the division of the human race into two sexes, female and male, is an artificial invention of our culture. “Nature really offers us more than two sexes,” she claims, adding, “Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits.” The decision to “label” a child as a girl or a boy is “a social decision,” according to this expert. We should not label any child as being either a girl or a boy, this professor proclaims. “There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference.”1 This book received courteous mention in The New York Times and The Washington Post. America’s most prestigious medical journal, The New England Journal of Medicine, praised the author for her “careful and insightful” approach to gender.2

I soon assembled a small library of books that counsel parents that the best child-rearing is gender-neutral child rearing. These books tell parents that true virtue is to be found in training your child to play with toys traditionally associated with the opposite sex. You should buy dolls for your son, to teach him how to nurture.3 You should buy an Erector set for your daughter. The underlying assumptions--that giving dolls to boys will cause boys to become more nurturing, or that giving girls Erector sets will improve girls’ spatial relations skills--are seldom questioned.

On the same bookshelf you can find books that do affirm the existence of innate differences in how girls and boys learn. But these books often promote antiquated and inaccurate gender stereotypes. “Girls are more emotional than boys.” “Boys have a brain-based advantage when it comes to learning math.” Those notions turn out to be false.

On one hand, you have books claiming that there are no innate differences between girls and boys, and that anybody who thinks otherwise is a reactionary stuck in the 1950s. On the other, you have books affirming innate differences between girls and boys--but these authors interpret these differences in a manner that reinforces gender stereotypes.

These books have only one thing in common. They are based less on fact and more on their authors’ personal beliefs or political agendas--either to deny innate sex differences or to use sex differences in child development as a justification for maintaining traditional sex roles. After waiting for somebody else to write a book about girls and boys based on actual scientific research and clinical experience, I finally decided to write one myself.

Every child is unique. I will not suggest that all boys are the same or that all girls are the same. I know that they are not. I have been a medical doctor for more than thirty years. I am the veteran of thousands of office visits with girls and boys. But the fact that each child is unique and complex should not blind us to the fact that gender is one of the two great organizing principles in child development--the other principle being age. Trying to understand a child without understanding the role of gender in child development is like trying to understand a child’s behavior without knowing the child’s age. Pick up a book with a title like What to Expect from Your Two-Year-Old. That book is very different from What to Expect from Your Eight-Year-Old. Of course, nobody is saying that all two-year-olds are alike or that all eight-year-olds are alike. While recognizing diversity among two-year-olds, we can still have a meaningful discussion of the ways in which two-year-olds and eight-year-olds differ, categorically, in terms of what they can do, what they’re interested in, how they relate to their parents, and so on.

At least with regard to how children hear and speak, gender may be even more fundamental to learning than age is. When the noted linguist and Georgetown University professor Deborah Tannen compared how girls and boys of different ages use language, she “was overwhelmed by the differences that separated the females and males at each age, and the striking similarities that linked the females, on one hand, and the males, on the other, across the vast expanse of age. In many ways, the second-grade girls were more like the twenty-five-year-old women than like the second-grade boys.”4

The analogy to age differences provides a good way to think about sex differences. No two girls are alike, just as no two boys are alike. Seven-year-old Stephanie, who likes to roll in the mud and play soccer, is very different from seven-year-old Zoe. Zoe’s favorite hobby is playing with her Barbies. Zoe also insisted on joining the Junior Poms, a sort of cheerleading group. Zoe was asking for lipstick at age five. Her mother, Barbara, a sincere old-school feminist, was horrified. “Where is this coming from?” she asked me, bewildered. “I only own one lipstick and I haven’t used it in six months. And I loathe and despise Barbies. I’ve never even bought one for Zoe. She gets all that trash as gifts from her aunts and uncles.”

Chapter 1

Differences

Jason is sixteen. His sister Sonya is fourteen. They come from a stable home with two loving parents. Mom and Dad are concerned about Jason, their son: He’s not working hard at school and his grades are sliding. He spends most of his free time playing video games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, or surfing the Web for pictures of girls.

Both parents are actually quite proud of Sonya. She is a straight-A student and an athlete, and she has many friends. But when I meet with Sonya, she tells me that she isn’t sleeping well. She wakes up in the middle of the night, feeling guilty about having eaten one whole slice of pizza at supper. She often has palpitations and shortness of breath. And she has just started to cut herself with a razor blade, secretly, on her upper inner thigh so her parents won’t see. She hasn’t told her parents any of this. On the surface she is the golden girl. Inside she feels that she is falling apart.

Her brother Jason, on the other hand, is happy as a clam. He can eat a whole pizza without the slightest remorse. He has no difficulty sleeping: in fact, his parents had to kick him out of bed at noon on a Saturday. He likes to spend his free time hanging with his two buddies who are just like him, playing video games and looking at pictures of girls online.

Matthew turned five years old in August, just before kindergarten started. He was looking forward to it. From what he had heard, kindergarten sounded like one long playdate with friends. He could hardly wait. So his mother, Cindy, was surprised when, in October, Matthew started refusing to go to school, refusing even to get dressed in the morning. More than once Cindy had to dress him, then drag him writhing and thrashing into the car, force him into the car seat, and then pull him out of the car and into the school.

Cindy decided to investigate. She sat in on his kindergarten class. She spoke with the teacher. Everything seemed fine. The teacher--gentle, soft-spoken, and well educated--reassured Mom that there was no cause for alarm. But Cindy remained concerned, and rightly so, because major problems were just around the corner.

Caitlyn was a shy child and just the slightest bit overweight all through elementary school. In middle school she underwent a metamorphosis from chubby wallflower to outgoing socialite. She lost weight so quickly that her mother, Jill, worried she might be anorexic. For the next four years, though, everything seemed great--in a frantic and crazy sort of way. Caitlyn was juggling a heavy academic load, had lots of friends, and maintained a full schedule of after-school activities, staying up until midnight or later doing homework. But she seemed happy enough--often frenzied and frazzled, sure, but still happy. Or at least that’s what everybody thought until the phone rang at 3:00 a.m. that awful, unforgettable November night. A nurse told Jill that Caitlyn was in the emergency room, unconscious, having tried to commit suicide with an overdose of Vicodin and Xanax.

These stories share a common element. In each case problems arose because the parents did not understand some differences between girls and boys. In each case trouble might have been averted if the parents had known enough about boy/girl differences to recognize what was really happening in their child’s life. In each case the parents could have taken specific action that might have prevented or solved the problem.

We will come back to each of these kids later in this book. Right now it may not be obvious to you how each of these stories illustrates a failure to understand sex differences. That’s okay. Later on we’ll hear more about Justin and Sonya, Matthew, and Caitlyn. Armed with some knowledge about boy/girl differences, you will be able to recognize where the parents made the wrong decision or failed to act, and you will see how the stories might have ended differently.

Les rares mariages mixtes avec les Retha’noï avaient peu à peu été tolérés depuis que le peuple des montagnes s’était révélé être un allié loyal qui restait dans la vallée aussi jalousement que les Fays, sinon plus. Mais se reproduire avec un étranger ? C’était impensable, et strictement défendu.

Au moment où Thero toucha Sedge avec sa baguette, une insupportable puanteur le parcourut. Il eut une brève impression d'yeux rouges et d'une gueule difforme pleine de dents jaunes avant qu'une effroyable force ne le frappe, en l'envoyant à l'autre bout de la pièce et dans le mur en pierre, si violemment qu'il en perdit presque connaissance. Il eut un haut-le-cœur et déglutit avec difficulté, en essayant désespérément de ne pas vomir.

Il est de notre devoir de renoncer aux anciennes pratiques de l'âge de fer. Vous tous ici n'en êtes-vous pas convaincus ? Bien sûr que si, messieurs, je le sais. C'est le rêve que nous partageons tous. Nous montrons au monde entier la voie qui ramène à la vraie chevalerie. Nous combattons l'injustice, l'immoralité, la cruauté et la tyrannie. Une action vile de la part d'Albion, et la structure s'effrite, le rêve s'écroule. Je suis votre Gloriana, votre reine, votre conscience et votre foi. Je vous rappelle un devoir que je n'ai pas oublié.

Ragnarok est venu, et puis les dieux sont morts !
Dans de nobles combats, un à un sont tombés,
Le rusé Loke, la blonde Frey, l’impétueux Thor,
A l'ultime bataille ne se sont dérobés.
A une ère nouvelle la Terre naît alors,
Dont la radieuse Albion le fardeau portera,
Et le monde à sa gloire enfin s’associera.

- Comment savez-vous que je ne vais pas encore vous tuez ?
- Une telle décision s'accompagne de rituels, des préliminaires, une mise en condition, un ton de voix. J'ai entendu beaucoup de chants de mort au cours de ma vie, monseigneur, et j'en ai chanté un certain nombre. De la même manière il y a les chansons de ceux qui vont être tués. Avez-vous jamais perçu ce genre de chansons, monseigneur ?
- Je ne vous entends pas chanter capitaine Quire.
- Je n'y tiens pas. J'aime la vie.
- Et la mort ?
- Pas la mienne.

Laurence s’accorda encore cinq minutes à rester ainsi, bien au chaud, les mains sur les écailles étroites et tendres du nez du dragon.
– J’espère ne jamais t’avoir rendu malheureux, mon ami, dit-il doucement.
– Jamais, Laurence, dit tout bas Téméraire.

- Je ne doute pas qu’ils seront contrariés de voir l’un de leurs joyaux en possession d’un simple officier britannique.
- Je ne vois pas en quoi cela concerne le moins du monde Napoléon ou les Chinois, s’indigna Téméraire. Je ne suis plus dans ma coquille, et je me moque que Laurence ne soit pas dans sa coquille. Nous avons vaincu Napoléon au combat et l’avons mis en fuite, tout empereur qu’il est ; je ne vois rien de particulièrement enviable dans ce titre.

Laurence saisit la tête de Téméraire à deux mains et, pendant un moment, pressa sa joue contre le museau souple ; Téméraire poussa un grognement de mécontentement.
- Laurence, Laurence, ne m'abandonne plus jamais ainsi.
Laurence déglutit.
- Mon cher, commença-t-il, avant de s'interrompre. Il n'y avait pas de réponse possible.
Ils restèrent ainsi tête contre tête sans rien dire, coupés du monde ; mais un instant seulement.

- Je ne suis pas un diplomate, déclara Laurence, mais je vous affirme, monsieur, que si vous croyez obtenir une once de bonne volonté de la part de ce prince à force de ravaler votre fierté devant lui, vous êtes un foutu imbécile ; et je vous serais reconnaissant de cesser de croire que l'on peut m'acheter avec des châteaux en Espagne.

La plupart des dragons présents semblaient appartenir à la même race, bien qu'on remarquât chez eux une grande diversité de tailles, de couleurs et de cornes; parmi ces dernières certaines étaient parfaitement lisses, d'autres crantées. Bientôt un dragon très différent des autres sortit du grand pavillon au sud; plus grand, plus cramoisi, avec des griffes dorées et une crête jaune vif courant de sa tête abondamment cornue jusqu'à sa queue. Il but dans le bassin, puis poussa un énorme bâillement, dévoilant une double rangée de dents, petites mais redoutables autour de quatre longs crocs incurvés.

La plupart des prix étaient incroyablement bas ; cela ne pouvait s’expliquer uniquement par le coût du prix du transport. Le phénomène en soi n’était pas surprenant car Laurence avait entendu les commissaires de la compagnie à Macao se plaindre de la rapacité des mandarins locaux et des pots-de-vin qu’ils exigeaient, en plus des taxes d’État. Mais la différence était si importante que Laurence dut réviser significativement son estimation du degré d’extorsion.

- Et où situeriez-vous Bonaparte, sur cette échelle ? voulut savoir Laurence, trop indigné pour rester poli : c’était une chose de déplorer la corruption ou de proposer des réformes judicieuses ; c’en était une autre de comparer le système britannique au despotisme absolu.
- En tant qu’homme, monarque, ou système de gouvernement ? demanda Tharkay. Il ne me semble pas qu’il y ait plus d’injustice en France qu’ailleurs, d’une manière générale. Il est certes donquichottesque de leur part d’avoir choisi de se montrer injustes envers les nobles et les riches au profit du peuple ; mais il ne me semble pas que se soit foncièrement mauvais – ni appelé à perdurer d’ailleurs. Quant au reste, je m’en remettrai à votre jugement, monsieur ; qui préféreriez-vous avoir de votre côté sur un champ de bataille : ce bon roi George, ou le second lieutenant d’artillerie venu de Corse ?
- Je préférerais avoir lord Nelson, répondit Laurence. Je ne crois pas que personne ait jamais suggéré qu’il aimait moins la gloire que Bonaparte, mais il a placé son génie au service de son pays et de son roi, et accepté de bonne grâce les honneurs que ces derniers ont choisi de lui accorder, au lieu de s’ériger en tyran.

- Lorsqu’on a très faim, mon cher, nos ambitions s’élèvent rarement au-dessus de notre estomac, lui dit Laurence. La liberté dont ils jouissent n’a rien de très enviable : la liberté de mourir de faim ou de se faire massacrer n’est pas de celles auxquelles on aspire. Et, ajouta-t-il, saisissant l’occasion, les hommes comme les dragons sont souvent bien inspirés de sacrifier une partie de leur liberté personnelle pour le bien général, qui fait progresser leur situation au même titre que celle des autres.

Quant à Arkady, il rechignait à tourner casaque tant qu’il resterai une seule de ses ouailles : Téméraire s’était étendu, en détails trop frappants, sur ses récits de trésors, de banquets et de combats épiques ; à l’évidence, le meneur de dragons sauvages redoutait que l’un de ses anciens sujets puisse revenir un jour auréolé de gloire, réelle ou factice, et le défier ; or, son statut tenait moins à la force brute – ses deux lieutenants le surpassaient dans ce domaine – qu’à une alchimie subtile mêlant charisme et vivacité d’esprit, ce qui rendait sa position d’autant plus vulnérable.

La nécessité fut un professeur contentieux, quoique implacable, dit-il. On s’est montré suffisamment enclin à me dénier mes droits, sans que je fournisse une excuse aussi commode pour qu’on ne m’écoute pas. Tu devras t’armer de patience, ajouta-t-il à l’adresse de Téméraire, si tu as l’intention de faire valoir tes droits : ceux qui détiennent tous les pouvoirs et privilèges apprécient rarement de les partager.

- Que pensez-vous de ce que j’ai fait de Paris ? S’enquit-il, avec un geste en direction de la nuée de dragons qui s’activaient au-dessus de la nouvelle avenue. Peu d’hommes ont eu l’occasion de contempler mon œuvre depuis les airs, comme vous.
- Un travail extraordinaire, Votre Majesté, lui dit Laurence.
Il était navré d’être sincère : c’était le genre d’ouvrage que seule la tyrannie, supposait-t-il, pouvait accomplir, et caractéristique de tous les travaux de Napoléon, balayant la tradition avec une forme d’élan irrésistible, il eût préféré juger cela affreux et mal conçu.
- Cela renforcera grandement le caractère de la ville, ajouta-t-il.
Bonaparte hocha la tête de satisfaction, et dit :
- Ce n’est qu’un miroir tendu, toutefois, au renforcement du caractère national que j’entends accomplir. Je ne permettrai pas qu’on ait peur des dragons : s’il s’agit de couardise, c’est méprisable ; de superstition, déplaisant ; et il n’y a aucune objection rationnelle. Ce n’est qu’une question d’habitude, une habitude qui être et sera brisée. Pourquoi Pékin serait-il supérieur à Paris ? J’aurai la plus belle ville du monde, aussi bien pour les hommes que pour les dragons.

C’était une carte, une immense carte en relief avec de la poudre d’or pour figurer le sable, des montagnes en bronze, des fragments de pierres précieuses pour les forêts et des rivières d’argent ; et à sa grande consternation, Laurence aperçut la petite plume blanche qui figurait les chutes : presque à mi-chemin entre la pointe du continent, où figurait Le Cap, et la péninsule acérée de la corne de l’Afrique. Dans ses pires cauchemars il n’avait pas imaginé qu’on ait pu les conduire aussi loin dans les terres.

Le terrain de reproduction s'appelait Pen Y Fan, du nom des montagnes inhospitalières qui en fendaient le cœur à la manière d'un fer de hache, coiffées de glace et dont les pics arides dominaient la lande : l'automne gallois, froid et humide, sentait déjà l'hiver et les autres dragons passaient leur temps à somnoler, apathiques, uniquement préoccupés de leur prochain repas.