SYM: That sound you hear is women not laughing. - 2/1/08

[Smartmarriages]

Here is grist for the John Van Epp keynote: Waiting to Marry and the Bill
Doherty banquet keynote: Raising Children for Good Marriages, both Thursday,
July 3, 2008 at the San Francisco Smart Marriages Conference.

- KAY HYMOWITZ: THE CHILD MAN
- NPR: YOUNG MEN STUCK IN ADOLESCENT-ADULT LIMBO

####################
> 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. Now that the SYM can put off
> family into the hazily distant future, he can ­ and will ­ try to stay a
> child-man. . . . 

> For the problem with child-men is that they're not very promising husbands and
> fathers. They suffer from a proverbial "fear of commitment," another way of
> saying that they can't stand to think of themselves as permanently attached to
> one woman. Sure, they have girlfriends; many are even willing to move in with
> them. But cohabiting can be just another Peter Pan delaying tactic. Women tend
> to see cohabiting as a potential path to marriage; men view it as another
> place to hang out or, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead observes in Why There Are No
> Good Men Left, a way to "get the benefits of a wife without shouldering the
> reciprocal obligations of a husband."


- KAY HYMOWITZ: THE CHILD MAN
The Dallas Morning News
Jan 27, 2008 

Today's single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence
and adulthood

It's 1965, and you're a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or
maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you're married, probably
have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she
was in your sister's class. You've already got one kid, with another on the
way. For now, you're renting an apartment in your parents' two-family house,
but you're saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup,
you're an adult!

Now meet the 21st-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. 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 21st century what adolescence was to the early 20th: a momentous
sociological development of profound economic and cultural import.

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 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order,
hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly
workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining
with friends. 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.

Freud famously asked: "What do women want?" Notice that he didn't ask what
men wanted ­ perhaps he thought he'd figured that one out. But that's a
question that ad people, media execs and cultural entrepreneurs have
pondered a lot in recent years. They're particularly interested in single
young men, for two reasons: There are a lot more of them than before, and
they tend to have some extra change.

Consider: In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old
white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were,
respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining
as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage
among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006 ­ a dramatic demographic
shift for such a short time period.

That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of
mortgages, wives and child-care bills. Historically, marketers have found
this group an "elusive audience" ­ the phrase is permanently affixed to "men
between 18 and 34" in adspeak ­ largely immune to the pleasures of magazines
and television, as well as to shopping expeditions for the products
advertised there.

A signal cultural moment came in April 1997, when Maxim, a popular British
"lad magazine," hit American shores. Maxim plastered covers and features
with pouty-lipped, tousled-haired pinups in lacy underwear and, in case that
didn't do the trick, block-lettered promises of sex! lust! naughty! And it
worked.

What really set Maxim apart from other men's mags was its voice. It was the
sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living room. Maxim asked the
SYM what he wanted and learned that he didn't want to grow up. And now the
Maxim child-man voice has gone mainstream. You're that 26-year-old who wants
sophomoric fun and macho action? Now the culture has a groaning table of
entertainment with your name on it.

That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women get a kick out of
child-men and their frat/fart jokes. But for many, the child-man is either
an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak. In contemporary female
writing and conversation, the words "immature" and "men" seem united in
perpetuity.

Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature come to be? The most
prevalent theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural
critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis.
Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in
their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles.

Insofar as the new guy media reflect a backlash against feminism, they're
part of the much larger story of men's long, uneasy relationship with
bourgeois order. In A Man's Place, historian John Tosh locates male
resistance to bourgeois domesticity in the early 19th century, when
middle-class expectations for men began to shift away from the patriarchal
aloofness of the bad old days.

Under the newer bourgeois regime, the home was to be a haven in a heartless
world, in which affection and intimacy were guiding virtues. But in Mr.
Tosh's telling, it didn't take long before men vented frustrations with
bourgeois domestication: They went looking for excitement and male
camaraderie in empire building, in adventure novels and in going to "the
club."

By the early 20th century, the emerging mass market in the U.S. offered new
outlets for the virile urges that sat awkwardly in the bourgeois parlor;
hence titles like Field & Stream and Man's Adventure, as well as steamier
fare like Escapade and Caper . When television sets came on the market in
the late 1940s, it was the airing of heavyweight fights and football games
that led Dad to make the big purchase; to this day, sports events ­ the
battlefield made civilized ­ glue him to the Barcalounger when he should be
folding the laundry.

But 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. Now that the SYM can
put off family into the hazily distant future, he can ­ and will ­ try to
stay a child-man. Not only is no one asking that today's twenty- or
thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father ­ that is, grow up ­
but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything he needs to settle down
in pig's heaven indefinitely.

Now, you could argue that the motley crew of Maxim, Comedy Central and Halo
3 aren't much to worry about, that extended adolescence is what the word
implies: a temporary stage. Most guys have lots of other things going on and
will eventually settle down. Men know the difference between entertainment
and real life. At any rate, like gravity, growing up happens; nature has
rules.

That's certainly a hope driving the sharpest of recent child-man
entertainments, Judd Apatow's hit movie Knocked Up. What sets Knocked Up
apart from, say, Old School, is that it invites the audience to enjoy the
SYM's immaturity even while insisting on its feebleness. The potheaded
23-year-old Ben Stone accidentally impregnates Alison, a gorgeous stranger
he was lucky enough to score at a bar. He is clueless about what to do when
she decides to have the baby, not because he's a "badass" ­ actually, he has
a big heart ­ but because he dwells among social retards. In the end,
though, Ben understands that he needs to grow up. He gets a job and an
apartment and learns to love Alison and the baby. This is a comedy, after
all.

The important question that Mr. 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.

For the problem with child-men is that they're not very promising husbands
and fathers. They suffer from a proverbial "fear of commitment," another way
of saying that they can't stand to think of themselves as permanently
attached to one woman. Sure, they have girlfriends; many are even willing to
move in with them. But cohabiting can be just another Peter Pan delaying
tactic. Women tend to see cohabiting as a potential path to marriage; men
view it as another place to hang out or, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead observes
in Why There Are No Good Men Left, a way to "get the benefits of a wife
without shouldering the reciprocal obligations of a husband."

And here's what may be the deepest existential problem with the child-man ­
a tendency to avoid not just marriage but any deep attachments. This is
British writer Nick Hornby's central insight in his novel About a Boy. The
book's anti-hero, Will, is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of
responsibility. He has no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact that
the author symbolizes by having the jobless 36-year-old live off the
residuals of a popular Christmas song written by his late father. Mr. Hornby
shows how the media-saturated limbo of contemporary guyhood makes it easy to
fill your days without actually doing anything.

Will's unemployment is part of a more general passionlessness. To pick up
women, for instance, he pretends to have a son and joins a single-parent
organization; the plight of the single mothers means nothing to him. For
Will, women are simply fleshy devices that dispense sex, and sex is just
another form of entertainment, a "fantastic carnal alternative to drink,
drugs and a great night out, but nothing much more than that."

The superficiality, indolence and passionlessness evoked in Mr. Hornby's
novels haven't triggered any kind of cultural transformation. The SYM
doesn't read much, remember, and he certainly doesn't read anything
prescribing personal transformation. The child-man may be into self-mockery;
self-reflection is something else entirely.

That's too bad. Young men especially need a culture that can help them
define worthy aspirations.

Adults don't emerge. They're made.

Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute's City
Journal (www.city-journal .org), from whose new issue this article is
adapted. Her e-mail address is letters at city-journal.org.

########################
- NPR: YOUNG MEN STUCK IN ADOLESCENT-ADULT LIMBO
Read the transcript or listen to the show at:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18482794


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