"Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them."

This saying was the shot heard ’round the First World when a T-shirt company in Florida took shirts bearing illustrations of Little Boy Blues running away from vengeful hails of two-dimensional pebble fire and started pumping them out like Chinese babies under Mao Zedong (see? I give you proof that both history and mass starvation can be fun if you just have the right outlook on life).

The "Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them" T-shirts were pulled off shelves around the nation because their makers were accused of misandry by everyone from prominent radio hosts to your best friend’s father or brother. For all the readers who haven’t got a clue what misandry is (which may well be almost all of you, since misandry is covered by the media about as often as unicorns are, and with far less accuracy), it means the hatred of men.

These T-shirts, which have become an icon of the intangible gender war, were admittedly leaning too much toward KKK-style feminism for the public good, but the real problem is that the boys on the T-shirts aren’t exactly proving this forbidden slogan to be wrong.

There’s a new study out every week: girls are surpassing boys in reading, in writing, in math. More girls are getting college degrees; more and more girls are buying white Persian cats and taking up careers as Evil Geniuses in remote mountain fortresses. Some universities, especially liberal arts colleges, are despairing because they’re hard pressed to get even a 50-50 male-female student ratio. Let’s face it; Ricky, you’ve got some ’splaining to do when it comes to why girls as a whole are whipping boys on the education scale.

Our society is programmed to ask why it is that boys are falling behind, and that’s just another symptom of a disease that goes beyond university statistics and psychiatric studies that cater to people with more money than problems.

The question that no one is asking is why girls are doing so well. "Girls are smarter," says the beatnik hippie whose corneas are bleached by her constant gazing into the sun for answers to her most elusive questions, such as where all the lost socks go when they escape their drawers. "Teachers like girls better," says the delivery boy with the personality of a withered pancake. "Spare change," says the hobo sitting under your mailbox as you grab the latest issue of Seventeen and toss the complimentary nail file into his lap. Are girls smarter? Are they more agreeable to work with? Do you really need that quarter that you’ve kept hidden in your shirt pocket?

No; girls are doing better in school because they have to.

Everyone’s heard some woman or other complaining about how women are paid less than men for doing the same jobs (and everyone’s used another word in place of "complaining"). The proof that we live in a male-dominated world lies both in the members of our government and in the lack of any female celebrities whose stomachs are large enough to keep down the average apple. Why are women paid less? Because when it comes to leadership, the world wants to a see a man taking the helm. This is not a feminist point of view; this is reality. This is solid fact.

Humankind is programmed to place men in power; ever since humanity was a monkey with a rock and a bad attitude (I say this without fear of reprisal, since I assume that everyone who doesn’t believe in evolution is off complaining to my editor that I’m allowed to exist), males have held the power. I haven’t seen any femiNazis staging riots to accuse Bonobo chimps of anti-woman attitudes; that’s because in nature, there’s no such thing as gender discrimination. What matters, the only thing that matters anywhere, is which sex can put fear into the other.

Men are more physically powerful than women; no Sojourner Truth or Elizabeth Blackwell can change that. The infeasibility of feminism lies in our base nature; protests can’t change what evolution made, what we are.

Girls have to adapt to this. In order to combat the gender bias, they have to wield the other spear of power: education. Universities and post-graduate schools are being flooded with female applicants; instead of racing against their male counterparts, women are clawing each other out for the scraps that male-oriented businesses and professions will toss their way. It’s a cycle that no one can break; as more women go to college, more women have to go to post-graduate school to surpass those women. As more women go to post-grad school, more women have to buy breast implants and throw themselves prostrate in front of their supervisors in hot little numbers from the Victoria’s Secret next door.

Class, are we all paying attention now? For all the men skimming this who have fallen into a bored stupor, let’s come back to the pretty words: Satin panties.

Meanwhile, how is increased competition from women spurring men forward? What is "it’s not," Alex. Competition is all well and good _ when it’s coming from a source that can blow down your fortress. The male-power attitude is so deeply ingrained within us that society has built an invisible caste system based on gender; males are the priests and warriors, while women are the merchants and peasants. Don’t shoot the editor before you’ve finished reading this; I’m not saying that every employer in the world would take a man over a woman. But enough would.

Think of it as if the employers were people going to vote; how many are going to run check marks through all the members of their own parties without knowing a thing about the candidates themselves?

Why aren’t boys doing better in school? Because they don’t have to. Their own genitals shield them from the necessity of going the extra mile. There’s no risk of men losing their positions to women; if our world was based on merit alone, breast cancer would have been cured long ago and the NBA would be the National Beauty Association. Until women are eye-for-eye with the balding bureaucrats and politicians that call the shots for our country, boys have no reason to catch up with girls.

The only question left is whether women are willing to force the gender issue where men will not. Can humanity defy everything it was ever programmed to do by putting the physically weak on par with the physically strong?

Tell us, ladies; can you put a little fear into them?

Jessie Matus will be a junior at Oneonta High School this fall.