Where Have the Good Men Gone?

From Menletter February-March 2011

By Tim Baehr

In a Wall Street Journal essay, and in her new book, Kay S. Hymowitz claims that many college-educated men in their 20s and 30s are undergoing an extended "pre-adult" period in which they "come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers...."

The essay appeared here: http://tinyurl.com/Where-Men; the book is Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, published March 1 by Basic Books.

We've seen the stereotype in movies and sitcoms: guys playing endless videogames, smoking pot, drinking beer, hanging out with other guys, and occasionally hooking up with a girl who may be looking for more and who is frustrated by her boyfriend's unwillingness or inability to grow up.

The frustration is expressed in another book title, this time by Julie Klausner, and cited in Hymowitz's article: I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated.

Hymowitz goes on to say:

What Ms. Klausner means by "guys" is males who are not boys or men but something in between. "Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends.... They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home."

Not boys or men but something in between. Pre-adults. Man-boys who, for many complex societal reasons, including the job market and mass media, find themselves "wait-listed" for adulthood. Unlike the adolescents of the last century, who couldn't wait to grow up and assume adult roles, the present pre-adults are in no hurry to do so. It seems to me that in some ways the behaviors described by Klausner and Hymowitz are not just pre-adult but preadolescent. Freud called the preadolescent period "latency," a period in which latent sexual drives are gratified by schooling, friendships, games, physical activity, and so on - the "perfect night" in the quote from Klausner. So the pre-adulthood that Klausner and Hymowitz describe may be not so much an extended adolescence but latency with occasional episodes of sex and drugs.

More from Hymowitz:

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.

She seems to be claiming that the rites of passage - called "male initiation" in the men's literature going back a couple decades - no longer exist to mark a boy's transition into adulthood. This is nothing new. The idea of male initiation and the effect of its lack on young men has long been a basic tenet of those who think about and write about men. Robert Bly, for example, covered this ground fifteen years ago with the publication of his book The Sibling Society and even earlier in his Iron John.

Also, is it really true that girls become women merely by having their first period? That's just too simple: No one would claim that boys become men merely after their first wet dream. The notion of initiation-by-menarche trivializes girls' rites of passage and ignores the need for girls to demonstrate that they are physically and psychologically competent to take their place among adults - whether as mothers, providers, or both. And the lack of initiation for girls is just as profound as the lack for boys.

Initiation in modern times in the West doesn't happen after a two-week or two- month ordeal in the wilderness, absorbing lore from elders around the campfire, and (for instance) receiving a ritual scar to signify entry into adulthood. In our western culture, initiation is a more drawn-out affair in which the pains and injuries of living become the impulses toward maturity. Girls and women are subject to the same kinds of ordeals that we men can reimagine and reframe as initiation into adulthood once we gain some perspective: loss, disappointment, illness, addiction, crushing responsibility, depression.

Okay, there's a lot more to this than we can cover here. There are too many unanswered (and maybe unanswerable) questions:

Are women to blame, as Hymowitz implies from the title of her book? Are the overprotective mothers of these pre-adult men to blame? Are the absent fathers? How about the school systems? Advertising industry? Movie industry? TV? Videogames? Anybody who claims to know the answers is just blowing smoke.

More: If husbands and fathers are "optional," are wives and mothers also "optional"? Yeah, women carry the babies and give birth, but are they the only ones who bond with them and are instrumental in raising them? Whose job is it to bring the pre-adult men to full manhood? Do women who want families have to choose among older "real" men, boy-men as mere sperm donors, or artificial insemination and single parenthood?

And more: What about the girls and women? Couldn't we also be talking about society turning girls into pseudo-men, with their three-piece suits, law degrees, and no-prisoners attitudes? Aren't many other young women vapid, texting, silly pre-adults addicted to watching pasty, moody vampires? And the shoes - what is it with that?

And for us men: Do we have to take the blame for this pre-adult phenomenon? Are books like those of Hymowitz and Klausner just more feminist attacks by women who want to change us, but not change themselves - who cannot accept us for what and who we are? Do we need to do anything about (1) ourselves or (2) women's and society's perception of us? Or should we just continue doing what we do, and let the women (or the complaining women at any rate) go fry ice? Do we need to "grow up"? Do we want to? What does growing up look like anyway?

Do we know who we are? Do we know what we want?

Ahhhhh. Those last two questions. Now we're getting somewhere. Men and women both would do well to spend some time and effort on them, looking inside ourselves and not into the dark and distorting mirror of social punditry.

Maturing is a process; it doesn't take place overnight (menarche) or after a week at a men's retreat. We may all be subject at times to arrested development, but that doesn't necessarily lead to a life sentence.