Too many men in their 20s live in a kind of extended adolescence—and women are sick of dealing with them. An excerpt from "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Turned Men Into Boys" by Kay S. Hymowitz.
American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.
In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular "lad" magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.
At the same time, young men were tuning in to cable channels like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell and Seth Rogen, cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy pranks. Americans had always struck foreigners as youthful, even childlike, in their energy and optimism. But this was too much.
What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
Single men have never been civilization's most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised.
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.
They might as well just have another beer.
1) Both men and women are making rational choices here. Men have no rights or privileges in modern society, and nothing but responsibilities. Women have no rite of passage to become a woman. Men who do pass their rite of passage are considered superfluous and useless anyway. The strengths that women demand from men on one hand, are seen as obsolete in the other. There is little to gain by following traditional male roles. And there are more reasons why there's little to gain: for instance,
2) We're outsourcing traditionally men's jobs right and left. And gradually automating the rest. Men make up the vast majority of engineering jobs - see: men with college degrees - but Benedict Arnold companies are importing H1B visa holders to do those jobs, and they're outsourcing them overseas whenever they can get away with it. In addition, the 2008 recession was a mancession - most jobs lost were lost by men. Men, thus, are faced with the prospect of moving into traditionally women's jobs - teaching and nursing. Both of which are crappy jobs frought with societal disrespect, abuse and overwork. ESPECIALLY if you are a male. Rampant misandry and female chauvinist hysteria about pedophilia and stranger danger are pushing men out of all sections of education. But then this is also rational in a savage, animal kingdom sense of the word: there are not enough teaching and nursing jobs to accommodate all the men and women who would want them if they could stomach all the abuse these jobs heap upon workers. There is a national and even global shortage of jobs and this is causing a tribalist mindset: we gotta get those jobs before they do. In this case, "we" is the womenfolk. Women are doing little more than defending their cabins in the top decks of the Titanic.
But ultimately, ladies, this economy is the Titanic. The system is sinking. Unemployment is rampant worldwide. Those jobs you're defending, the ones you make so much money at now, are going to go away, too. You're going to get undercut by automated teaching, Japan is working on automation in the elderly care sector, marketing and other female-dominated sectors are vulnerable to automation, and the mass layoffs of millions of men will drastically reduce the size of the market. Even if every woman is a millionaire, there's only so much you're going to purchase. The sheer loss of customers due to mass male poverty will catch up to your business or your employers. (In many cases, it already has.) Oh and do I need to remind you ladies of how many men and women alike are toiling under mountains of college debt? Yeah, if you're heading into college, this could include you. Your rise to the top will get checked by outsourcing, automation, and a systemwide collapse. Those men you laughed at and trampled on the way up, will not be around to save you on your way down.
Also consider what happens when so many men are left without jobs or hopes of marriage: the Youth Bulge. Remember the Crusades, World War I and II, and the European colonization and genocide of most of the world? That was because of huge numbers of men with no prospects for wealth or mates. Look it up. You, living in a world overrun by unemployed men. Not a pretty picture. Calling men a bunch of misogynist pigs and hurling feminist slogans at them isn't going to help you one whit when these unemployed, forgotten and disrespected men start careening around in search of something to uplift their status - namely, some criminal activity of some sort. There's not enough jails, there never has been. Youth Bulges always lead to devastation - and with no new groups of brown indigenous people to exterminate (funny how it always ends with Europeans wiping out brown people - see: Africa, North and South America, Australia...), that means the shit's going to hit the fan and blow back through a neighborhood near you.
But wait, I'm not done yet.
What about all the poor and unemployed women who can hardly make ends meet? What's their world like? All the talk nowadays is about women on the rise and women proving their superiority over men, but an entire 99% of the population ain't on the rise at all.
