Christina Hoff Sommers

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books *Who Stole Feminism?* (1994) and *The War Against Boys* (2000). She also hosts a video blog called *The Factual Feminist*. Sommers has called herself an equity feminist, equality feminist, and liberal feminist. The *Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy* categorizes equity feminism as libertarian or classically liberal. Several authors have described Sommers' positions as antifeminist. The feminist philosopher Alison Jaggar wrote that Sommers rejected one of the distinctive conceptual innovations of second-wave Western feminism. Sommers has denied that she is anti-feminist. Sommers has criticized women's studies as being dominated by man-hating feminists with an interest in portraying women as victims. Sommers has denied the existence of the gender pay gap. From 1978 to 1980, Sommers was an instructor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. In 1980, she became an assistant professor of philosophy at Clark University and was promoted to associate professor in 1986. Sommers remained at Clark until 1997, when she became the W.H. Brady fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. During the mid-1980s, Sommers edited two philosophy textbooks on the subject of ethics: *Vice & Virtue in Everyday Life: Introductory Readings in Ethics* (1984) and *Right and Wrong: Basic Readings in Ethics* (1986). Beginning in the late 1980s, Sommers published a series of articles in which she strongly criticized feminist philosophers and American feminism in general. In *Who Stole Feminism?*, Sommers outlines her distinction between *gender feminism*, which she regards as being the dominant contemporary approach to feminism, and *equity feminism*, which she presents as more akin to first-wave feminism. She uses the work to argue that contemporary feminism is too radical and disconnected from the lives of typical American women, presenting her equity feminism alternative as a better match for their needs. Sommers describes herself as "a feminist who does not like what feminism has become." In criticizing contemporary feminism, Sommers writes that an often-mentioned March of Dimes study, which says that "domestic violence is the leading cause of birth defects," does not exist and that violence against women does not peak during the Super Bowl, which she describes as an urban legend. In 2000, Sommers published *The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men*. In the book, Sommers challenged what she called the "myth of shortchanged girls" and the "new and equally corrosive fiction" that "boys as a group are disturbed." Criticizing programs that had been set up in the 1980s to encourage girls and young women, largely in response to studies that had suggested that girls "suffered through neglect in the classroom and the indifference of male-dominated society," Sommers argued in *The War Against Boys* that such programs were based on flawed research. She asserted that reality was quite the opposite: boys were a year and a half behind girls in reading and writing, and they were less likely to go to college. She blamed Carol Gilligan as well as organizations such as the National Organization for Women (NOW) for creating a situation in which "boys are resented, both as the unfairly privileged sex and as obstacles on the path to gender justice for girls." According to Sommers, "a review of the facts shows boys, not girls, on the wrong side of an education gender gap." Sommers has served on the board of the Women's Freedom Network, a group formed as an alternative to "extremist, ideological feminism" as well as to "antifeminist traditionalism." In the 1990s, she was a member of the National Association of Scholars, a conservative political advocacy group. She is a member of the Board of Advisors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. She has served on the national advisory board of the Independent Women's Forum and the Center of the American Experiment. Sommers has defended the Gamergate harassment campaign, saying that its members were "just defending a hobby they love." During Gamergate, Sommers appeared at several events with far-right political commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. In 2019, Sommers endorsed Andrew Yang's campaign during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. The Women's Political Caucus (NWPC) awarded Sommers with one of its twelve 2013 Exceptional Merit in Media Awards for her *The New York Times* article "The Boys at the Back."