The winter issue of City Journal features a sad and dispiriting article about the difficulty some of our young men have been having growing up. Kay S. Hymowitz describes the rise of the Maxim man, the Child-Man in the Promised Land, trapped "in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood."
(A more succinct version of her article appeared in the New York Post over the weekend: Rise of the Manchild: What Happens When Boys Refuse to Grow Up.)
Hymowitz describes the emergence of a young male culture of infantile pleasures and adolescent avoidance of responsibility and involvement:
Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?
Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood’s milestones—high school degree, financial independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers—happily—in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import. Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”; David Brooks recently took a stab with the “Odyssey Years,” a “decade of wandering.”
But while we grapple with the name, it’s time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn’t bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see “The New Girl Order,” Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it’s receding.
Hymowitz takes a stab at finding explanations for the effective surrender of so many young men to the pleasures of unbridled play and sexuality and the concomitant avoidance of adult responsibilities but all of her explanations seem wanting. Is it a reaction the feminist assault on traditional masculinity? Simply an outgrowth of the traditional male rebellion against authority and bourgeois expectations? Her ultimate explanation is non-explanatory:
... this history suggests an uncomfortable fact about the new SYM: he’s immature because he can be. We can argue endlessly about whether “masculinity” is natural or constructed—whether men are innately promiscuous, restless, and slobby, or socialized to be that way—but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile. For whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state, proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it is marriage and children that turn boys into men.
Hymowitz almost "gets it", ie she recognizes that SYMs above all else, avoid true intimacy, that most terrifying and most rewarding of all states. She comments on the Judd Apatow movie, Knocked Up, but her take on it misses something crucial:
(Knocked Up) is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn’t know how to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will come along and show you. But the important question that Apatow’s comedy deals with only obliquely is what extended living as a child-man does to a guy—and to the women he collides with along the way.
Human development always depends on a dynamic balance between the progressive forces pushing a young person forward and regressive forces pulling him back. The toddler steps forward into the world, experiencing the freedom of movement once he has mastered his own motor skills, yet when the inevitable bumps and bruises occur, when he trips over his own two still poorly coordinated feet, he races back to Mommy for the security only her arms can offer. Just so, the adolescent making his first tenuous moves into young adulthood can be easily derailed. A rebuff from a girl can make retreat into the comfort and safety of beer and video games seem like a preferable option. The young man who has spent most of his life being taught that the traditional masculine traits have lost value to the cultural elites may well find that it is better to surrender the game than risk ongoing demoralization.
When I wrote about Knocked Up, I had not yet seen the movie. Based on reviews and an interview I heard on NPR with Apatow and lead Seth Rogan, I commented on Marriage and Children:
The Feminist inspired devaluation of manhood adopted by the opinion leaders and the cultural elite (only too happy to press the meme that men are unnecessary for rearing children, and in fact, are often considered a detriment) has had long standing deleterious effects on our children and the ideal of marriage. The fact that for most, if not all, the reality of marriage falls short of an idealized, fantasied marriage, has become a part of the narcissistic tendency to place our own gratification above the needs of anyone and anything else; it is one reason broken marriages and broken homes are so prevalent. For too many people, it is just easier to break up than to actually work out the difficulties in a problematic marriage; after all, working things out means we can't get everything we want. As a result, the children of divorce grow up lacking the certitude that they can persevere in marriage even during the inevitable difficult times.
Since then I have watched Knocked Up a couple of times and found it thoroughly endearing and moving. Despite its often puerile and obnoxious language the movie has a decided sweetness to it and implicitly recognizes the deep desire of the main character for intimacy rather than just sex. Seth Rogan's character, just as with so many SYM, uses sex to defend against his own, often barely conscious and suppressed, desires for intimacy. The movie is remarkable for finding that desire beneath the beer, porn, and video games obsessions which Kay Hymowitz decries.
The problems Hymowitz describes represent a retreat and surrender by too many young men who refuse to enter the playing field because they are convinced they cannot compete; they find all sorts of ingenious rationalizations and externalizations to support their refusal, replacing desperate compensatory sex for intimacy, to the consternation of the young women who equally desperately must choose between the faux intimacy of sex and loneliness. Too many of our children are ill equipped for intimacy, growing up under the often overt command to indulge in all instinctual pleasures and eschew limits; their parents' examples, drugs, sex, and rock and roll, with the resultant divorced and damaged families left in the wake, leaves them yearning for that which they cannot even name let alone obtain.
It is all terribly sad, but as I noted in my pre-review of Knocked Up, the existence of the movie seems hopeful:
"Knocked Up" is likely to help covertly move the discussion. Offering role models of imperfect individuals trying to grow up and find ways to elevate the needs of another person or persons above their own immediate short term needs is an indispensable role that Hollywood could fill. If "Knocked Up" is financially successful, perhaps it will start a trend of movies made by people who understand that while sex and violence sells, love and intimacy lasts.
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