I disagree with academic feminism a lot — with those vague oppressor stories about the patriarchy, with the strange unwillingness to admit inherited-gender differences and with the tone of faculty lounge militancy. But academic feminism is right about the big thing.

The big thing is that for thousands of years social thinking has been dominated by men — usually alpha men — who saw life as a place where warriors and traders went out and competed for wealth and power. These male writers were largely blind to the systems of care that undergirded everything else.

These male-dominated narratives created a tunnel. Everything that extolled competition, self-interest and independence was celebrated, and everything that celebrated relation and intimacy was diminished. As Niobe Way, Alisha Ali, Carol Gilligan and Pedro Noguera argue in t he introduction of “The Crisis of Connection,” a new anthology they edited, the stereotypical masculine culture values “self over relationships, individual success over the common good, the mind over the body, and thinking over feeling.”

When children are young, they grow up unaware of the tunnel. At age 9, girls are sophisticated and expressive about their own feelings. But then as they get into adolescence they become aware of the preferences around them. As Gilligan’s work demonstrates, they conclude that if they expressed their real emotions nobody would want to be with them. They begin to hide themselves in order to fit in. “I never utter my real feelings about anything,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary. “My house is wallpapered with lies,” a girl in a Harvard research group observed.