Girls, Boys Have It Equally Bad in School

Rather than trying to decide whether boys or girls have it worse in school (“Boy Trouble,” Nov. 23), consider what feminists have been saying for years: Our system of rigidly dividing up character traits between genders leaves both groups ill-prepared to deal with the myriad stresses, public and private, that they’ll encounter as adults.

Boys like Ken, who belched aloud in class during a discussion about love to hide his embarrassment, are discouraged from developing ways of communicating their feelings about relationships.

Cultural definitions of masculinity compel boys to act aggressively, and so they learn to express emotion only on the football--or battle--field.

The father who calls his son’s aggressiveness “natural” should ask himself how often the child was encouraged to display a (supposedly “feminine” and hence devalued) trait, like vulnerability. We tell half of the population that they can never show any insecurity and then wonder why they express “tremendous amounts of anger” instead.

Meanwhile girls, encouraged to talk about their feelings, do end up articulate in English class. But from early on, cultural pressures to be pretty will far outstrip any emphasis on their intelligence. And since the standard for female beauty disseminated via advertising simply cannot be achieved by anyone without anorexia and airbrushing, girls develop the impaired self-esteem documented by many cultural studies.

So which gender has it worse? That’s easy: They both do.

DIANA YORK BLAINE

La Verne