#136： Boys Adrift With Dr. Leonard Sax
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Summary
Dr. Leonard Sachs has spent his career studying the sex differences between boys and girls and how this can affect their flourishing in the development in adolescence and into young adulthood. He is the author of several books, including Why Gender Matters and Girls on Edge.
Transcript
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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
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So I'd say in the past 10 years or so, there's been this uptick in the number of articles
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you see in magazines, websites, newspapers, even there's even books written on this topic.
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And the topic is the fact that young men in America and in other Western countries are
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Fewer young men in America are going to college.
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Those that do go to college, fewer of them are graduating from college, fewer earning
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The earning prospects of men have been declining for the past 20 or 30 years.
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All the while, more women have been going to college, graduating college, earning advanced
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degrees, and their earnings have been going up.
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There's been lots of theories put out there why that is.
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Well, my guest today on the podcast has spent his career studying the sex differences between
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boys and girls and how this can affect their flourishing in the development in adolescence
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Second, which we'll be talking a lot about today, is called Boys Adrift, where he takes
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on and proposes his ideas and backed by research on why boys are struggling in today's modern
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And not just the economy, just in their personal lives as well.
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And then his third is Girls on Edge, where he discusses the challenges that girls face
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culturally, educationally, and in the broader economy.
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And instead of just showing theories and research on why this is happening, what I love about
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Dr. Sachs is he proposes some solutions on what parents, teachers, mentors, policymakers
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can do to create an environment that can allow both boys and girls to flourish.
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If you are a parent, if you are a teacher, a mentor, you're going to get a lot out of this,
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and you're probably going to want to go out and buy these books and check them out.
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So without further ado, we're going to talk to Dr. Leonard Sachs about why gender matters
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and the development of our young boys and girls.
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So you have spent your career researching and investigating how sex differences between boys
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and girls can affect their intellectual and emotional development and have been an advocate
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to make policy changes to take the new research about sex differences into account.
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And in fact, one of your books is called Why Gender Matters.
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And a popular idea out there is that gender really doesn't matter that much.
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Yes, there could be some differences, but any differences that exist are negligible.
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Why does gender matter in the intellectual and emotional development of our children?
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Well, you certainly have described the political consensus, which is that gender doesn't matter,
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that gender is a social construct, and that anyone who says otherwise is either an idiot,
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But that's actually not the reality, and it's not what the data show.
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So, for example, give a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons to a child, four, five, six years of age.
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I cite studies in which researchers did exactly that in the United States, another study in England,
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another in South Africa, another in Japan, another in Thailand.
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And in each study, researchers gave young children a blank piece of paper and a box of crayons
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Girls everywhere draw people, pets, flowers, and trees,
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usually two, three, or four standing on a horizontal ground.
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The people have eyes, mouth, hair, and clothes.
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The girls use ten or more crayons, with the predominance of red, orange, yellow, green, daisy, and brown.
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Most boys, not all, but most boys, do something quite different.
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Most boys are trying to draw a scene of action at a moment of dynamic change,
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like a monster eating an alien or a rocket smashing into a planet.
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Human figures, if present, are often stick figures, lacking eyes, mouth, hair, and clothes.
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The boys use six or fewer crayons, with the predominance of black, gray, silver, and blue.
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When the teacher has given a piece of paper and a box of crayons
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and she is praising and commending Emily and Melissa and Sonia and Vanessa
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for their pictures of people, pets, flowers, and trees.
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Jacob's trying to draw a car crash at the moment of impact.
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Where one car is being crushed between two others.
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And she says, no, Jacob, you know, a car crash.
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That's so violent, you know, and people are going to get hurt or injured.
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And, Jacob, I actually don't see any people at all in your drawing.
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And Emily had drawn a picture of a girl with a little puppy
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You know, why can't you draw something more like Emily?
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There's one thing that kids are equally good at, girls and boys, at every age,
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and that's figuring out what the grown-up's like.
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And it doesn't take the boys very long to figure out they're doing it wrong.
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I have visited now more than 380 schools across the United States and around the world.
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And I was in a second-grade classroom in the United States where teachers have free time.
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And some of the girls were sitting and coloring.
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And one of the boys was running around the room making a buzzing noise.
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And I said, how come you don't want to sit and draw?
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And he said, without hesitation, he said, drawing's for girls.
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I'm sure the teacher never said drawing is for girls, but she might as well have.
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She's unintentionally sending the message that drawing is for girls.
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The lack of awareness of gender differences has the unintended consequence of reinforcing gender stereotypes.
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And when you look at who's taking AP art history,
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you find that girls greatly outnumber boys, which is ironic,
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because most of the artists they're studying are men.
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Ignoring gender differences, pretending that gender doesn't matter,
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In 1987, 66% of high school students taking AP computer science were boys.
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Last year, only 19% of high school students taking AP computer science were girls.
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Ignoring gender does not eliminate gender stereotypes.
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You end up with what we have in this country, which is girls who think computer science is for boys and boys who think drawing is for girls.
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If you do it differently, then you can break down the gender stereotypes.
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And I can tell you about a superintendent of 17 elementary schools who insisted that all her teachers learn these strategies.
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And she told us at the conference I hosted in Houston that at each of those 17 elementary schools,
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when you say to students, free time, you can do whatever you want,
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I don't think there's any innate difference in how much kids love to draw.
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But there's a big difference in what boys want to draw compared to what girls want to draw.
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And if you don't understand those differences and pretend that they don't exist,
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you end up reinforcing gender stereotypes, as we have done in this country.
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So I imagine testosterone is the big cause of the difference of why boys are more action-oriented.
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Testosterone has nothing to do with the difference.
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There is no sex difference in testosterone levels among 4, 5, 6, 7 years old children.
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Children at that age make very little testosterone,
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and there is no sex difference between the amount of testosterone in a 5-year-old boy compared with a 5-year-old girl.
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The sex differences are not related to hormones.
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They are genetically programmed, and they are found across species.
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So, for example, the sex differences that I talk about are just as evident in chimpanzees and monkeys as they are in our species.
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Further evidence that these differences are not socially constructed.
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So you've hit on a little bit about how teachers may inadvertently give the message to boys
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that the way they approach learning or what they do is not good.
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How else have American schools changed in the past 30 years that have put boys at a disadvantage?
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So I recently visited a high school in this country, in the United States,
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The assignment was to write a story about anything you like.
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And this boy chose to write a story about the Battle of Stalingrad, winter of 1942,
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And he researched it at considerable length and described the Russian soldier patrolling a street
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And the Russian soldier fires his rifle at point-blank range into the face of the German soldier
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and then describes what happens when you fire a military rifle at point-blank range in another man's face.
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And a piece of eyeball goes this way, a piece of chin goes that way,
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This boy was suspended from school, and the parents were told he could not return.
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And so the parents secured at their own expense a professional evaluation
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and a letter from the professional assuring the school and the district
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that the boy posed no imminent danger to himself or to others.
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And when the parents shared that story with me, it really struck a chord
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because I attended public schools in Ohio, K-12.
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And in 1977, our lead teacher for English at our high school
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invited me and three other students to sit for a competition
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administered by the National Council of Teachers of English.
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And we were shown into a room, and the proctor gave us each a blue book and said,
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I chose to write a story about East German refugees escaping to West Germany.
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When I share this story with high school students today,
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I have to explain to them that Germany used to be divided in two,
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and East Germans weren't allowed to go to West Germany,
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But anyhow, I imagined East German refugees trying to escape to West Germany
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crossing a minefield in the middle of the night.
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And one of them steps on a mine, which blows off his left leg to the knee
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and his right leg to the hip, so he now has no feet.
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He's crawling west, blood pouring out from the stumps where his legs used to be.
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The East German guards, of course, have heard the noise
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and have turned their flood lamps to try to find him on the ground
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and are shooting at him, but missing, I described the bullets popping up,
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And West German guards are calling out encouragement to him.
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Of course, they're not allowed to go out into the minefield.
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And he's crawling west, and the bullets are going on either side of him
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And finally, he reaches the border, and the West German guards pick him up
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to take him to hospital, and at that moment, he dies.
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My own mom died in September 2008, and going through her papers after her death,
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I found that she had kept the certificate sent to our home address
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by the National Council of Teachers of English,
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awarding me their highest honor in creative writing.
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writing stories about traumatic amputation, violent death,
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drawing pictures of soldiers attacking each other with knives,
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throwing snowballs at each other, used to get you an award,
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Now you can get expelled or suspended for doing things that boys have always done.
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That's what I mean when I say that school has become unfriendly to boys.
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So the zero-tolerance policies, definitely not boy-friendly.
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Zero-tolerance policies for violence, meaning that if you bring a G.I. Joe
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with a plastic rifle to school, you can be suspended.
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And in my book, I describe several such stages in which elementary school boys were suspended
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for bringing a plastic G.I. Joe so that I've gone to school.
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And the principal in each case said, look, it's a zero-tolerance policy.
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The policy says that any replica gun, regardless of size,
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mandates a 911 phone call and immediate suspension.
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And the fact that he's five years old and that the gun is so small,
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I have to tape it with scotch tape to the report doesn't matter.
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We now know that zero-tolerance policies are not effective.
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They do not in any way diminish actual school violence.
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They do substantially increase disciplinary referrals.
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And I think they do something else that's harder to measure.
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They send the message to boys that your kind is not welcome here.
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You like to write stories about combat and World War II.
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And the boys are getting the message loud and clear.
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We're seeing a disengagement from education among boys in every demographic,
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white, black, and Latino, affluent, middle-income, and low-income,
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And I can tell you stories from my firsthand experience of families where both mom and dad
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are professionals, read in their spare time, their daughters read in their spare time.
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And the son told me he'd rather be boiled in oil than read a book in his spare time,
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because his favorite free-time activity is playing Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, Halo.
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How are some of the ways that boys and girls learn different?
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I think you mentioned in your book that competition is important for boys.
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Well, again, the big differences between girls and boys are not cognitive, but motivational.
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The big differences between girls and boys are not in what they can do, but in what they want to do.
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And that's really the key to understanding all the strategies which I've observed.
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And, again, I didn't make up any of these strategies.
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They're all strategies I've observed in schools that are successful.
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So when you visit a school like Corowa in Melbourne, Australia,
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where you find that more than half the girls take AP physics, which is an astonishing figure
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and unbelievable but true, you find they teach physics in a profoundly different way.
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They don't teach it the way it's taught in most other English-speaking countries.
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They begin, for example, with the wave-particle duality of light.
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When you find at schools where all the boys or a great majority of the boys love to write poetry
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and love to write stories and love Emily Dickinson and Jane Eyre and Jane Austen,
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And you do need to understand and learn from master teachers how to engage boys in creative writing and poetry
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and how to engage girls in computer science and physics.
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And when you do that, you will find that you will break down gender stereotypes,
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and you can greatly increase the proportion of boys who want to spend their free time reading Emily Dickinson
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and girls who want to spend their free time writing computer code.
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However, it is unforgivable to speak these things in this country,
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because in this country what happens at schools of education is determined not by data but by politics and ideology.
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Do, are single-sex classes or schools one solution of many that can help break down those gender stereotypes?
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I used to think so, and actually took a five-year sabbatical for medical practice,
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in part to encourage public schools to offer that option as a choice for parents who wanted it,
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The Obama administration appointed an ACLU attorney to govern this domain,
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and she has decided on her own, without any basis in law or regulation,
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that such programs should not be allowed in American schools.
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And so she has embarked on a witch hunt, again, without any justification in law or regulation,
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And it's very difficult, with the federal government actively seeking to shut your program down,
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to sustain such a program in the United States.
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I guess it's a shame, because I think I've read,
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because it's one of the problems that girls have in classrooms,
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is that they have that stereotype in their mind,
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and then they see the boys raising their hands and jockeying for, you know,
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trying to make the answers, so they're less likely to participate,
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Yeah, that critique had substantial empirical force 30 years ago.
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But that notion that girls are intimidated because boys are raising their hand
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What's more common in American schools today is what I call Hermione Granger Syndrome,
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where the girl is waving her hand to answer the teacher's question,
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and the boys are sitting on their hands, not speaking.
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But nevertheless, despite the fact that girls today are not intimidated by boys,
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look, I have met with students in hundreds of schools across the United States.
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And, for example, I was in a middle school where they had the regular honor roll,
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and then the principal's honor roll, which is for the kids who are doing really well.
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And there were 22 kids on the principal's honor roll at this particular school in the United States,
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can you explain to me why the principal's honor roll,
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which all the kids understood was the superior honor roll,
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why does the principal's honor roll have 19 girls and 3 boys?
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And many boys answered, and they all said the same thing.
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American boys now believe that girls are smarter than boys,
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which is weird for me because I'm a middle-aged man,
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meaning that I grew up in the United States in an era where,
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when boys outnumbered the girls on the honor roll,
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when those earning honors at high school graduation,
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from the valedictorian to the winner of honors in English to the editor,
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However, that's very rare today to find a boy at a non-selective public school
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when you look at who's editing the newspaper, the yearbook,
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And this has gone on for so long now that when you ask boys,
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So the 1970s analysis that girls are intimidated by boys in the classroom
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girls remain underrepresented in computer science, physics, electrical engineering,
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but because teachers have no idea how to teach those subjects to girls.
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Again, my book Girls on the Edge focuses on how do you teach this content in a way that works for girls,
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but based on what actually works in the classroom to engage and motivate girls in computer science,
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It's pretty well established now but seldom used because, again, the notion merely stating the proposition that the best way to teach computer science to girls
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is different from the best way to teach computer science to boys is politically unacceptable,
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Again, what is taught in schools of education is not based on data or empirical research.
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So also in Boys Adrift, you talk about the uptick in ADHD diagnoses.
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Why are there more and more boys on ADHD medication?
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Right, and it's really dramatic, too, because in 1979, we have a good paper published in Science Magazine
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showing that about 1% of American kids have been diagnosed with ADD.
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In 2013, the CDC published data showing that 20% of high school boys in this country have been diagnosed and treated for ADHD,
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A boy in the United States is about 14 times more likely than a boy in England to be treated for ADD.
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And I encountered this myself, again, in my own practice.
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Parents were stationed in England for four years.
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Dad was a civilian contractor of the United States Air Force.
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Their son was four when they went over and eight years old when they returned.
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But within weeks of returning to public school in Pennsylvania, Mom told me,
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you know, your son's, you know, not an outstanding student.
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Maybe he would benefit from being on medication.
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It was like everyone was on the payroll of the drug companies.
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A kid in the United States, as I said, is much more likely to be on medication for ADD.
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A kid in the United States is 40 times more likely to be treated for bipolar disorder,
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93 times more likely to be on antipsychotic medications like Risperdel or Zyprexa compared to a kid in Italy.
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One is the tendency in the United States to regard medication as a first resort rather than a last resort.
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And I have visited schools in Australia, in England, in Canada, in Mexico, in New Zealand, in Scotland.
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And I can tell you that kids misbehave in all countries.
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But if a kid in Scotland is running around and throwing things, the teacher will say, it's quite enough of that nonsense.
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But in this country, it is very likely, which is what a teacher in this country might have said 30 years ago.
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But today, a teacher in this country will say to parents, you know, your child might benefit from evaluation.
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And in this country, the board-certified child psychiatrist will say, well, let's try Adderall and see if it helps.
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So there's been an explosion in the prescribing of medication.
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And I explore the reasons in my book, Boys Adrift, and in my forthcoming book, The Collapse of Parenting,
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which was initially titled The Collapse of American Parenting,
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Why Most Kids Would Be Better Off Raised Outside the United States.
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But non-celebrity authors don't get to choose their titles.
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The title of the book coming out in December is The Collapse of Parenting,
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The Three Things You Must Do in Order for Your Child to Become a Fulfilled Adult.
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Are there any detrimental effects of prescribing ADD medication to children who might not need it?
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Well, there's detrimental effects regardless of whether the child needs it or not.
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And I'm talking now about the stimulant medications, Adderall, Ritalin, Concerta, Medidate, Focalin, Datrana,
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Sounds like a bunch of different medications, but it's actually just two, amphetamine and methylphenidate.
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Adderall and Vedance, the most popular medications are amphetamines.
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And these medications damage the motivational center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens.
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And I have 14 good studies, which I cite, showing that these medications, even in low doses,
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can damage the motivational center of the brain.
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And, again, I describe such a boy in my own practice.
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Mom got frustrated with him one day and confronted him and said, you know, what's the story here?
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You work a few hours a week at the coffee shop.
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You don't even have a girlfriend, for goodness sake.
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And she found out I only work a few hours a week at Starbucks.
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He was on Ritalin from 9 years of age to 17 years of age prescribed by a different doctor.
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When you damage the motivational center of the brain, the nucleus accumbens,
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you get a boy who looks fine, feels fine, perfectly content.
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He's perfectly content with his 55-inch flat screen, his online pornography, and his video
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I mean, so what should parents do when teachers or counselors or other parents say, hey, maybe
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Because I mean, that's a lot of social pressure.
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And a parent in the United States is under a lot of pressure.
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If your child is not performing at a high level, you will start to hear those whispers as this
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parent who returned from England described them.
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From other parents say, you should have your son evaluated.
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And I really fought with the publisher to include formal guidelines in my book, Boys Adrift,
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so that parents can decide on their own, does my child meet criteria for ADD?
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And the publisher really challenged me and said, are you suggesting, these are the exact
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words of the publisher to me when Boys Adrift was in production, are you suggesting, the
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publisher said, that a parent, after reading your book, is competent to question the judgment
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I said, not only that, I'm saying a parent must question the judgment of a board-certified
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psychiatrist because psychiatrists in the United States prescribe medication for just about
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So the moment you make that appointment, it is very likely that the doctor will hand you
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And you must question the doctor's diagnosis and the doctor's treatment.
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Because again, in this country, medication is the first resort.
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Outside of North America, medication is the last resort.
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And the result is that we are experimenting on kids in a way which has no precedent.
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And, you know, I was doing this talk at Grace Church School in Manhattan.
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He said, Dr. Sachs, I just don't find this believable.
00:29:49.620
He said, millions of kids are taking these medications.
00:29:52.780
And you're suggesting that these medications damage the motivational sound of the brain.
00:29:59.120
If there was any truth to what you're saying, and I interrupted him, I said, if there was any
00:30:04.000
truth to what I'm saying, you'd have heard this before.
00:30:06.280
From a more authoritative source than Leonard Sachs, a family doctor, you'd have heard this
00:30:13.460
from someone like Dr. Joseph Biederman, chief of research in pediatric psychiatry at Harvard
00:30:21.800
And, of course, Dad didn't know I was going with this.
00:30:24.140
And I said, you know, the same thought occurred to Senator Charles Grassley, United States
00:30:28.020
Senate Judiciary Committee, who summoned Dr. Biederman to the United States Senate and said,
00:30:33.020
Dr. Biederman, you've really been pushing Adderall hard.
00:30:37.020
You have said that if a parent, if a doctor prescribes Adderall for a child and the parent
00:30:42.260
does not promptly fill and administer that medication, Dr. Biederman, you've said that
00:30:47.740
parent should be considered for charges of criminal child neglect.
00:30:53.000
Dr. Biederman, are you by any chance taking money from the drug companies that you've never
00:30:58.380
But it turns out he was, more than $1.6 million, according to his count.
00:31:03.980
That count was never independently verified, which is fine.
00:31:11.580
A doctor can accept as much money as he wants to for the drug companies, and he's not breaking
00:31:20.900
He should have told us that he was taking this money, that he was functioning essentially
00:31:28.660
But he's still a director of pediatric psychiatry research at Harvard, despite all the articles
00:31:34.900
of the New York Times documenting how he took all this money.
00:31:43.260
Senator Grassley, in his investigation, had many of the leading lights of American psychiatry
00:31:50.900
come in, and the most chilling line of testimony, he asked one of these psychiatrists who had
00:31:56.680
accepted millions of dollars and not disclosed it, why didn't you disclose it?
00:32:01.560
And the psychiatrist said, well, because it's standard practice.
00:32:09.360
And that's very troubling when the leaders of child psychiatry say that it's standard
00:32:14.520
practice for the leaders of child psychiatry to accept millions of dollars from drug companies
00:32:22.120
Now, your local child psychiatrist isn't getting anything, I assure you.
00:32:25.500
And I've given these talks to psychiatrists, and they are incensed that their leaders have
00:32:29.900
sold out, that the leaders of child psychiatry in the United States at Harvard, at Emory,
00:32:34.840
at the National Institute of Mental Health, have accepted millions of the drug companies,
00:32:39.800
never disclosed it, and made these pronouncements without telling us that they were functioning
00:32:45.680
as paid spokesmen, and they were all men, paid spokesmen for the drug companies.
00:32:54.020
We don't have that anywhere outside of North America.
00:32:58.420
So, one factor that you talked about in Boys Adrift that I didn't really know much about
00:33:05.740
until I read about it, that's starting, we're seeing how it's affecting boys, and I think
00:33:10.220
there's even research saying it's affecting girls as well, is this endocrine disruptors?
00:33:18.960
What are those, and how do they affect the physical, mental, and emotional health of boys
00:33:25.360
So, that's a focus not only of my book, Boys Adrift, but also of my book, Girls on the
00:33:30.600
So, when I give this talk to parents, I'll look around for someone who has a clear plastic
00:33:38.660
And I'll say, this bottle is made out of polyethylene terephthalate, and it was probably shipped in
00:33:45.800
And inside a truck, the temperature can get very warm.
00:33:49.460
Inside a closed truck on a sunny day, even if the ambient temperature is not warm, the
00:33:55.980
temperature in the truck can easily rise to 120, 140 degrees Fahrenheit.
00:34:00.920
And when that happens, toxins such as diathlethyl phthalate and antimony will leak out of the
00:34:10.400
They're odorless, they're tasteless, but they work in your body like a female hormone, like
00:34:18.060
And the irony is that these people think they're really healthy by drinking bottled water, and,
00:34:22.800
of course, they're consuming these endocrine disruptors, substances that work in the human
00:34:29.740
And the effects are different on boys compared with girls.
00:34:33.680
In boys, in teenage boys, you drop testosterone levels.
00:34:38.140
And teenage boys need testosterone for motivation, among other things.
00:34:42.220
And I document and explain that point in Boys and Drift.
00:34:49.020
But the effect in girls is to accelerate the onset of puberty.
00:34:53.200
And so, in the United States, more than half of girls have now begun the process of puberty
00:35:00.180
Puberty accelerated for both boys and girls throughout much of the 20th century, but in
00:35:04.180
the last 30 years, the age of onset of puberty has not changed for boys.
00:35:09.100
It's stayed around 12 years of age, but it has accelerated, continued to accelerate, really
00:35:16.980
So that, as I said, more than half of American girls have now begun puberty prior to 10 years
00:35:23.280
And that's really harmful for lots of reasons, for girls and for boys.
00:35:27.320
I was sitting in a 7th grade classroom where there was a 13-year-old boy sitting next to
00:35:37.180
The 13-year-old girl could easily have passed for a 16-year-old girl.
00:35:42.540
The 13-year-old boy could easily have passed for a 9-year-old boy.
00:35:48.420
There's always been a sex difference in the age of onset of puberty.
00:35:57.520
But, again, talking about boys, you look at men at university in the United States, and
00:36:05.320
according to recent studies, one in three college-age men now report difficulty achieving and maintaining
00:36:14.440
A college-age man today has a testosterone level comparable to what would have been seen in
00:36:30.480
And one, of course, which is the decline of courtship.
00:36:35.680
And you find quite a few men, and I've spoken to them personally, who would rather masturbate
00:36:41.320
over pornography rather than pursue and date and be intimate with a young woman.
00:36:47.840
That is now common in the United States if it would have been considered pathological
00:36:55.980
So what can people or parents do to avoid or mitigate the effects of these disruptors?
00:37:03.060
Yeah, it's actually very easy to protect your child from endocrine disruptors.
00:37:10.680
Don't buy anything that's shipped room temperature in plastic.
00:37:14.680
It's fine to buy juice in plastic if it was shipped refrigerated and it's stored refrigerated
00:37:22.480
But plastic is the source of many of these endocrine disruptors.
00:37:25.840
Cosmetics, likewise, many of the shampoos and lotions that children, especially girls,
00:37:34.100
use are very high in these endocrine disruptors.
00:37:38.000
Manufacturers in the United States are not required to disclose that.
00:37:41.140
But again, I provide very detailed guidelines in my book, Girls on the Edge, and also for
00:37:49.480
I know a lot of our listeners are the parents of sons.
00:37:53.760
You mentioned one of the challenges facing girls is the way that we teach, for example,
00:37:59.700
physics or computer science just isn't what motivates them or gets them interested.
00:38:04.200
What are some other challenges facing young girls in America today?
00:38:10.700
Well, I think the sexualization of girlhood is a big one.
00:38:14.680
That's the opening chapter of my book, Girls on the Edge.
00:38:17.240
And I begin the book with Halloween with, again, a family from my own medical practice where
00:38:25.960
mom was trying to persuade her daughter to wear the Bavarian Dirndl outfit that she had
00:38:35.620
And the girl said, no, you know, I've already picked up my outfit.
00:38:39.440
But this was a few years back, she had chosen a Pussycat Dolls outfit, which consisted of
00:38:45.060
a brassiere top, hot pants, fishnet lingerie, and stiletto heels, which they had bought, which
00:38:53.720
You know, if you imagine walking to Sears 30 years ago saying, hey, I'd like to buy an
00:38:58.760
outfit for my nine-year-old girl that consists of a brassiere top, hot pants, fishnet lingerie,
00:39:05.780
and stiletto heels, they'd probably call the police.
00:39:09.340
You know, they'd probably arrest you because you're obviously a pedophile.
00:39:12.680
But today, this is sold at Walmart and all the other major outlets, and here's what scary
00:39:19.400
is what all the cool nine-year-old girls are wearing.
00:39:21.960
And when mom said, well, you know, if you don't want to dress up in my outfit, look, there's
00:39:27.540
And her daughter said, Mom, only the fat girls dress like that.
00:39:32.860
The cool girls, going back now to my own words, the cool girls all dress in this provocative
00:39:43.480
That's what you wear if you're a cool girl and you're nine years old in the United States.
00:39:47.620
And this is really harmful because presenting yourself as a sexual object when you're a nine
00:39:53.060
or 10-year-old girl, before you have a sexual agenda, we now have good research on this.
00:40:06.140
Sexuality becomes a performance, a show that you put on for boys.
00:40:09.560
And one consequence of this is an explosion in the proportion of girls who identify as lesbian
00:40:17.780
Fifty years ago, the best numbers were that between one and two percent of American women
00:40:25.540
Right now, depending on which study you look at, between 15 and 24 percent of young women
00:40:34.480
and teenage girls identify as lesbian or bisexual.
00:40:38.320
So that's a factor of 10 increase, a tenfold increase in 50 years.
00:40:43.700
When you look at men, what proportion of men identify as gay or bisexual hasn't changed in 50 years.
00:40:56.260
Why has this exploded for girls and really not changed at all for boys?
00:41:00.820
Well, that's, again, the focus of the opening chapters of Girls on the Edge.
00:41:05.160
But one reason is the sexualization of girlhood, the way in which the society, the culture,
00:41:14.140
the popular culture, including the Disney Channel, now pushes girls to present themselves sexually
00:41:19.220
at eight, nine years of age in a way that would have been unthinkable and considered perverse
00:41:27.760
Middle school has trickled down into third grade, and I've had eight-year-old girls whose mom
00:41:35.460
told me that she's refusing to go to school because the boys say she has a muffin top,
00:41:43.160
meaning that you have to wear midriff to be a cool girl at eight years of age.
00:41:47.080
And she has a little roll of baby fat over her belt line, and that's what the kids call
00:42:00.400
She is judging herself based on whether or not the boys think she's cute at eight years
00:42:08.100
Yeah, and I'm sure that leads to further problems of body dysmorphia, anorexia, bulimia
00:42:15.020
Well, Dr. Sachs, this has been just a really fascinating discussion, and we didn't get
00:42:19.400
to everything we could talk about because there's so much.
00:42:22.800
But where can people learn more about you and your work?
00:42:27.800
I just hired a professional web designer to bring my website into the 21st century.
00:42:32.720
It's LearnSachs.com, where you can see all the presentations I'm doing and send me an
00:42:39.120
email, and I do try to answer every one if I possibly can.
00:42:42.560
Well, Dr. Sachs, thank you so much for your time.
00:42:47.720
He's the author of the book, Why Gender Matters, Boys Adrift, Girls on the Edge.
00:42:55.800
And also, you can find out more information about his work at LeonardSachs.com.