Where Have The Good Men Gone? - Projects at Harvard

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THE SATURDAY ESSAY February 19, 2011

Where Have The Good Men Gone?Kay S. Hymowitz argues that too many men in their 20s are living in a new kind of extendedadolescence.

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Live Chat Thursday

Author Kay Hymowitz answered readerquestions in a live chat about her controversialessay on Thursday, Feb. 24. Replay the event.

By KAY S. HYMOWITZ

Not so long ago, the average American

man in his 20s had achieved most of the

milestones of adulthood: a high-school

diploma, financial independence,

marriage and children. Today, most men

in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal

adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much to

recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has

become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in

men.

"We are sick of hooking up with guys,"

writes the comedian Julie Klausner,

author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, "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." What Ms. Klausner means by

"guys" is males who are not boys or men

Erin Patrice O'Brien for The Wall Street Journal

Betw een his lack of responsibilities and anentertainment media devoted to his every pleasure,today's young man has no reason to grow up, says

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Two Cheers for the Maligned Slacker Dude

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." One

female reviewer of Ms. Kausner's book wrote, "I had to stop several times while reading

and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?"

For most of us, the cultural habitat of pre-adulthood no longer seems noteworthy. After

all, popular culture has been crowded with pre-adults for almost two decades. Hollywood

started the affair in the early 1990s with movies like "Singles," "Reality Bites," "Single

White Female" and "Swingers." Television soon deepened the relationship, giving us the

agreeable company of Monica, Joey, Rachel and Ross; Jerry, Elaine, George and

Kramer; Carrie, Miranda, et al.

But for all its familiarity, pre-adulthood

represents a momentous sociological

development. It's no exaggeration to say

that having large numbers of single

young men and women living

independently, while also having enough

disposable income to avoid ever messing

up their kitchens, is something entirely

new in human experience. Yes, at other

points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and

yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in

cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always

relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major

demographic event.

What also makes pre-adulthood something new is its radical reversal of the sexual

hierarchy. Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in

greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a

bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most

professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry

women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and

making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their

brothers and boyfriends.

Still, for these women, one key question

won't go away: Where have the good men

gone? Their male peers often come

across as aging frat boys, maladroit

geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap

neatly crystallized by the director Judd

Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked

Up." The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben

Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken

fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl)

and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los

Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby

friends who spend their days playing

videogames, smoking pot and

unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up

as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be

clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what

needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible

grownup.

So where did these pre-adults come

from? You might assume that their

author Kay Hymow itz. She discusses her book,"Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned MenInto Boys."

Enlarge Image

Getty Images

WHY GROW UP? Men in their 20s now have an arrayof toys and distractions at their disposal, fromvideogames and sports bars to 'lad' magazines likeMaxim, w hich makes Playboy look like Camus.

Enlarge Image



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appearance is a result of spoiled 24-year-

olds trying to prolong the campus drinking

and hook-up scene while exploiting the largesse of mom and dad. But the causes run

deeper than that. Beginning in the 1980s, the economic advantage of higher education

—the "college premium"—began to increase dramatically. Between 1960 and 2000, the

percentage of younger adults enrolled in college or graduate school more than doubled.

In the "knowledge economy," good jobs go to those with degrees. And degrees take

years.

Another factor in the lengthening of the

road to adulthood is our increasingly

labyrinthine labor market. The past

decades' economic expansion and the

digital revolution have transformed the

high-end labor market into a fierce

competition for the most stimulating,

creative and glamorous jobs. Fields that

attract ambitious young men and women often require years of moving between school

and internships, between internships and jobs, laterally and horizontally between jobs,

and between cities in the U.S. and abroad. The knowledge economy gives the educated

young an unprecedented opportunity to think about work in personal terms. They are

looking not just for jobs but for "careers," work in which they can exercise their talents

and express their deepest passions. They expect their careers to give shape to their

identity. For today's pre-adults, "what you do" is almost synonymous with "who you are,"

and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.

Pre-adulthood can be compared to adolescence, an idea invented in the mid-20th

century as American teenagers were herded away from the fields and the workplace

and into that new institution, the high school. For a long time, the poor and recent

immigrants were not part of adolescent life; they went straight to work, since their

families couldn't afford the lost labor and income. But the country had grown rich

enough to carve out space and time to create a more highly educated citizenry and work

force. Teenagers quickly became a marketing and cultural phenomenon. They also

earned their own psychological profile. One of the most influential of the psychologists

of adolescence was Erik Erikson, who described the stage as a "moratorium," a limbo

between childhood and adulthood characterized by role confusion, emotional turmoil

and identity conflict.

Like adolescents in the 20th century,

today's pre-adults have been wait-listed

for adulthood. Marketers and culture

creators help to promote pre-adulthood

as a lifestyle. And like adolescence, pre-

adulthood is a class-based social

phenomenon, reserved for the relatively

well-to-do. Those who don't get a four-

year college degree are not in a position

to compete for the more satisfying jobs of

the knowledge economy.

But pre-adults differ in one major respect

from adolescents. They write their own

biographies, and they do it from scratch.

Sociologists use the term "life script" to

describe a particular society's ordering of

life's large events and stages. Though

such scripts vary across cultures, the

archetypal plot is deeply rooted in our

biological nature. The invention of

adolescence did not change the large

Roman numerals of the American script.

Adults continued to be those who took

over the primary tasks of the economy

and culture. For women, the central task

Everett Collection

Marty (Ernest Borgnine) is 34 and single, to thechagrin of his mom— and himself. He f inally f inds love,even if his friends call her a "dog."

Enlarge Image

Everett Collection

Wyatt (Peter Fonda) and his friend Billy set off on amotorcycle trip across America. Encounters w ithhippies, drugs and jail ensue.

Enlarge Image



usually involved the day-to-day rearing of the next generation; for men, it involved

protecting and providing for their wives and children. If you followed the script, you

became an adult, a temporary custodian of the social order until your own old age and

demise.

Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults

don't know what is supposed to come

next. For them, marriage and parenthood

come in many forms, or can be skipped

altogether. In 1970, just 16% of

Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been

married; today that's true of an

astonishing 55% of the age group. In the

U.S., the mean age at first marriage has

been climbing toward 30 (a point past

which it has already gone in much of

Europe). It is no wonder that so many

young Americans suffer through a

"quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their future.

Given the rigors of contemporary career-

building, pre-adults who do marry and

start families do so later than ever before

in human history. Husbands, wives and

children are a drag on the footloose life

required for the early career track and

identity search. Pre-adulthood has also

confounded the primordial search for a

mate. It has delayed a stable sense of

identity, dramatically expanded the pool

of possible spouses, mystified courtship

routines and helped to throw into doubt

the very meaning of marriage. In 1970, to

cite just one of many numbers proving the point, nearly seven in 10 25-year-olds were

married; by 2000, only one-third had reached that milestone.

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

Everett Collection

Tony Manero (John Travolta) has an unfulf illing job at ahardw are store. He really lives for w eekend nights("Watch the hair!") at the disco.

Enlarge Image

Everett Collection

Ambitious stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) justw ants to get to the top. His new riches nab him suchnifty gadgets as a sushi maker.

Enlarge Image

Universal Pictures/Everett Collection

After a drunken affair makes the immature Ben Stone(Seth Rogen) a father-to-be, he makes a go, slow ly, ofbecoming a grow nup.

Enlarge Image



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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.

—Adapted from "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys" by Kay S.Hymowitz, to be published by Basic Books on March 1. Copyright © by Kay S. Hymowitz.Printed by arrangement with Basic Books.

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Where Have The Good Men Gone? - Projects at Harvard