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Boys? Doing fine. Men? Not so much.

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Boys? Doing fine. Men? Not so much.

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By Josh Kahn

September 17, 2008

Cheryl Miller does an effective job of taking down a pair of juvenile sounding “save the men” books, but I disagree with her basic premise. Men do have major cultural issues right now and ironically this is causing women as many problems as men.

Boys need a lot of guidance to develop into something other than barbaric, lazy man-children. Ever spend time around little boys? They like destroying things, playing borderline sadistic games and making the sickest jokes they can think of. Later, they discover sex.

The codes of our cultural moment don’t have a lot to say about how men should behave. That’s because basically, our culture thinks that men and women are the same and has trashed the old archetypes of manliness. A phrase like “be a man” sounds downright archaic and what’s taken its place is a general expectation that men and women should develop in more or less the same way.

Without any guidance, men in our culture have tended to become either wimps (metrosexuals, full time world of warcraft players and “nice guys”) or thugs (frat boys, gansta rap copycats and school dropouts) – and both groups aren’t exactly rushing to take responsibility for themselves, let alone a family. In a way this is fine with the guys, who get to enjoy an extended adolescence. They’re essentially kids with more expensive toys and even get to have sex without any of responsibility women used to make them take on to get it (or if they can’t figure out how to get laid they’ve generally turned to the internet instead).

So who suffers? Women. Educated women have been hit by a growing dating crunch as the number of women with college degrees outpaces men (Americans rarely date outside their education levels) while uneducated women are stuck as the single mothers in the broken homes those educated women study in their sociology classes.

It’s true that different cultural moments embrace different ideals of manliness, but the common denominator is responsibility. Men have to be poked, prodded and generally forced into taking on responsibility far more than women and right now we don’t have the cultural infrastructure in place to do that. The guys are alright, but the men have issues.

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Comments

Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 Comments

zoo prison posted: September 23, 2008 1:48 pm

You're right Josh. Something I dove into over the summer. http://zooprisonreality.squarespace.com/blog/2008/7/30/man-up.html

Michael Lucero posted: October 2, 2008 12:36 pm

I'm reminded of a line from Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind: "The...fanatic reformer, intending to cleanse society, may find that he has scrubbed it clean away." Men had a traditional role in society, and when that was undermined and wiped away, they found that they now had no role at all. And I think it's colossally and grossly unfair, not to mention extremely sexist, to say that women are the only ones, or even the main ones, who suffer from this trend. Sure, men who feel that an extended adolescence is just fine for them may seem more visible in this culture, but that doesn't mean they are at all regular. There are many who are beset by confusion and despair by the lack of purpose or orientation that society has served to them. Perhaps it hasn't occurred to you that a lot of men feel that they cannot take decisive action because they have accepted popular premises about themselves and are thus unsure how to act correctly at all.

Pan Cascadian posted: October 2, 2008 4:23 pm

Dating and what not is a market. Keep the government out and let people make their own decisions on the relationships they grow and people they want to be. If you can't compete in the current market, what am I supposed to do? Bail you out? Put in Governmental regulation? um... no thanks.

Anonymous posted: October 6, 2008 5:06 pm

"Sure, more men have choosen to put off marriage and the adult responsibilities that come with it. " ... {sarcasm on} Now that couldn't possibly have anything to do with the horrible way men are treated in divorce court, could it? {sarcasm off} In Martello v. Martello, Mr. Martello was ordered to pay from a $9,000/month gross income amounts of spousal support ($5,600) and child support ($2,800) that according to the appeals court left him with only $882/month to live on. And the appeal court neglected (they are judges, they don't do math) to deduct his federal, state and FICA taxes (another $2,600/month). Mr. Martello by the way was awarded 40+% time with his children - although I don't know how the court expected him to feed and house them. If you want men to want to start getting married again, you are going to have to give up trying to murder them in divorce court.

Anonymous posted: October 17, 2008 1:20 pm

oh please! Adults know that they're expected to have some type of work, bring in some type of income, treat others with a modicum of respect, pick up after themselves, keep themselves clean, not act like an ass and take responsibility for their actions. It isn't a "man" thing or a "woman" thing. It's a "adult" thing. Frankly, I'm tired of hearing the "men used to have a role, supporting the family. Women took that away and now we don't know how to be men." Grow up.

Anonymous posted: October 27, 2008 6:29 pm

When the gals started giving it away for free the fellas took them up on the offer. Perhaps the gals should not give themselves away so cheaply, starting with the co-eds.

Walter Koehler posted: October 29, 2008 3:23 pm

Another problem is that standards of behavior established over centuries have been overturned in the last 50 years. I'm not anti-feminist, we need more gains for women in the workplace, but feminism has completely changed the rules of the game. Not changed them, discarded them. Men really don't know how to act around women a lot of the time, and I don't mean drunken lounge lizards. We need to create new assumptions that everybody shares.