Translator: Mohand Habchi Reviewer: Queenie Lee
Let me check with you first.
Raise your hand, please,
if you have a son, a grandson or a nephew.
Please raise your hand?
All right.
Keep your hand raised, please,
if your son, grandson or nephew is having problems either with motivation,
grades, ADHD or addiction to video games?
Keep your hands raised
if one of your sons, grandsons or nephews fits that category.
Okay. About 30 percent of the audience fits that category.
So question one is why are we blind to something that is so much around us
that we would have to even ask the question "Is there a boy crisis?"
Second, is there a boy crisis?
Number three that I'll be looking at tonight
is some causes and a solution or two.
So let me start with our blindness.
Think about when we hear of a police officer shooting a black boy.
We rightly protest, "Black lives matter."
But no one even thinks of saying, "Boys' lives matter."
The boy in "black boy" we're invisible to.
The boy part of "black boy" doesn't matter
because historically, we've been dependent upon boys dying in order for us to live.
We bribe them by social bribes calling them heroes,
telling them they'll have glory if they die on our behalf.
So, our first issue is
if our very survival has been dependent upon our sons' willingness to die,
being sensitive to their death competes with our survival instinct.
We can't get anywhere, in terms of seeing the evidence for the boy crisis,
unless we take that curtain up first.
If we would do that, the type of evidence we'd be seeing
is that for the first time in U.S. history,
our sons will have less education than their dads.
If we take this worldwide,
the U.N. found this year that boys have fallen behind girls
in every single one of the 70 developed nations.
So what do developed nations have in common?
They have in common a much greater propensity for divorce,
leaving boys oftentimes without their dads.
So dad-deprived boys becomes the number one cause of the boy crisis.
When you have less father involvement,
what happens is that the boy ends up - and a girl, by the way -
ends up having less likelihood of being empathetic, assertive,
being much more likely to do badly in every single grade area in school,
being more likely to be suicidal, homicidal, to shoot up schools
and being more likely to be in prison.
When you look at prisons,
prisons are basically centers for dad-deprived boys.
In California, since 1980, we've built 18 new prisons,
one new university.
There's been a 700 percent increase
in the prison population in the United States since 1972.
That's a 93 percent male population,
mostly a dad-deprived boy population.
Here is the most frequent pattern.
The boy hears his parents in conflict, soon the dad disappears.
The boy becomes depressed.
Anthony Sims, here in Oakland,
his last Facebook post was, "I wish I had a father."
Boys who hurt, hurt us.
Anthony Sims soon became the Oakland killer earlier this year.
But other boys act out not by killing singly like Anthony Sims,
but act out by doing school shootings.
Most people don't know
that there has been one school shooting per week, on average, since Sandy Hook.
And we often say school shootings are the result of guns,
they're the result of family values, the result of mental health problems.
But girls live in the same families, with the same family values,
similar mental health problems, the same violence on TV,
but our daughters are not doing the shootings.
Our sons are.
And so, here's just a sense of the location of those shootings
in two years after Sandy Hook.
(Gunfire)
School shootings
are mostly white boys' method of acting out their hopelessness
and also the white boys' method of committing suicide.
My perspective is I see suicide as a reflection in boys
of our inability to help track boys in a constructive way toward manhood.
And we see that in the data also.
So for example, before age nine, girls and boys committed suicide equally.
Age 10 to 14, twice the amount for boys.
15 to 19, four times the amount for boys.
Age 20 to 24, six times the amount for boys.
So if dad-deprived boys is the number one cause of the boy crisis,
the number two cause is very much related.
Boys go from the dad deprivation at home to a male-teacher deprivation in school.
We didn't use to know the importance of that.
We now know that boys do do better with male teachers, on average.
But we also have discovered this year,
as a result of the U.N. doing a study worldwide,
that the feminization of education is a contributing factor to boys' problems.
When the United Nations did a study worldwide,
they found that boys all over the world
are one-third more likely to be graded higher on a reading test
when the teacher does not know
that the person who took the test is a boy.
This leads to cause three: lack of purpose.
When I was a boy, we basically had two senses of purpose.
You were either a warrior or you were a sole breadwinner.
But as divorces occurred, male-female relationships got shook up,
and the feminist movement came in and they did a wonderful thing,
which was they expanded girls sense of purpose
from the old raise children only, to being able to raise children,
raise money or do some combination of both.
But no one stepped in and helped to expand boys' sense of purpose
in an equivalent way.
Instead, boys were told to earn money, earn money, earn money
or, alternatively, be a loser.
The women's movement and the society helped create affirmative action
to introduce women to professions they hadn't been comfortable with,
such as STEM professions: science, technology, engineering and math.
But no one introduced boys to the caring professions.
So one possible solution to the purpose void
is to expand boys' sense of purpose,
to consider the option of being a full-time dad,
an elementary school teacher, a social worker, a nurse.
We even have to say words like "male nurse."
Or we can look at, more broadly,
the creation of a larger White House Council on boys and men,
in the way that we already have a White House Council on women and girls,
to address the 10 plus causes of the boy crisis.
A question that somebody once asked me
was, "Well, will boys not consider themselves losers
when they become full-time involved in the caring professions,
and there is pressure at them?"
But I saw back as early as 1976
a clear example of why boys will not consider themselves losers
when they get more involved with their sons.
I was at a party in 76,
and a guy comes up to me and says, "Are you Warren Farrell?"
And I go, "Yes."
And he goes, "You formed a men's group that I joined,
and the group had more impact of my life than any other thing."
And I said, "Well, what created that?"
He goes, "The most important question the group asked me
was an exercise in which we were asked, 'What is the biggest hole in your heart?'
And I didn't know the answer,
but I blurted out, without thinking about it,
that it's actually I was so involved in my career -
I told the group, Warren - that I ended up neglecting my son, neglecting my wife,
and that's the biggest hole in my heart.
And it's really a deeper hole now
because I got divorced, I got remarried.
And the men's group knew at the time that my wife was pregnant with a boy.
And the group said to me,
'Well, what would you like to do if you could do anything you wanted?'
And I said, 'Well, actually, it would be to take five years off
and raise my son full time.'
And the group encouraged me - and I should say pressured me -
to ask my wife and talk to her about that.
And my wife said, 'Go for it, John.'
And so, I went for it, and it's now been two years."
I said to him, "Good decision?"
"No, the best decision of my life.
Up until I took care of my son,
all of my life was about me, me, me, me, me.
Suddenly, it was about my son, my son.
Every move I made, I considered precious.
Every day, I wanted to wake up and support him.
I certainly learned to love and be loved."
As he said that, somebody came up to the table that we were sitting at.
I had just come back from my first book tour, been on a TV a great deal,
and this guy says to me, "Can I have your autograph?"
And I go, "Sure," generous me.
And the other guy, the fellow asking for the autograph, says,
"Actually, I meant the other guy."
(Laughter)
I was dying of embarrassment, self-righteousness caught up with me,
and I said, "I guess you're famous. So what's your last name, John?
I haven't had a TV for about eight years."
And John goes, "Lennon."
(Laughter)
And I go, "Let's see" - proud of myself mind you -
"you're a member of a singing group. Aren't you?"
(Laughter)
He goes, "Yeah."
And I go, "What's the name of that group?"
He goes, "The Beatles."
And I go, "Oh" -
that ignorant I was not.
What I got from that experience with John
was that John Lennon had basically told me
that he had discovered another John Lennon.
A John Lennon who was not dependent
on getting love by earning money as a human doing,
but a John Lennon who could get love by being loved.
I think he pointed a way to us for an evolutionary shift
of us being able to get love by being loved.
I think no one suggested that we imagine that better than John
when he said,
"All you need is love."
Thank you.
(Applause)