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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Laurie Fendrich

Just Hangin' Forever, Dude

The lamest generation?
(Image from Knocked Up)


Kay S. Hymowitz’s must-read essay, “Child-Man in the Promised Land,” in the current issue of The City Journal, is a brilliant, bouncy, but ultimately depressing analysis of a new and increasingly common type of twentysomething American male. If this is what our colleges and universities are actually producing, we professors should forget diddling around with “outcomes assessment” and instead all commit seppuku.

The single, employed, and mostly white “child-man” lives his post-bac years as “a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3, and, in many cases, underachieving.” Unlike men their age in 1970 — 85 percent of whom were married by the age of 30 — today’s child-men are Animal-House slobs who hole up with a couple of fellow dudes in a semi-skanky apartment, enduring unrewarding cubicle jobs during the day. At night and on weekends they play video games (over 2 hours a day — more than kids in high school!), stare at the TV set (favorites: pro wrestling, pro football, South Park, The Daily Show, Comedy Central) visit such ultra-vulgar websites as TuckerMax.com, get wasted (on alcohol, not pot) and, with surprising frequency, get laid. The furthest thing from their minds is marriage. In fact, serious relationships with young women their age are beside the point. We’re talking unkempt, loathsome cads who are proud to be unkempt, loathsome cads.

According to Hymowitz, this unappetizing creature emerged because of a general backlash against feminism, and, going all the way back to the early 19th century, because of the perennially uneasy fit between restless males and staid bourgeois society. These two circumstances, Hymowitz contends, are horribly exacerbated by big media’s effluvia of the sexually vulgar, scatalogically suggestive, snickeringly ironic entertainment — to which child-men are addicted because it enables and prolongs their adolescent behavior.

The effects of all this on the greater society are deleterious, Hymowitz argues. By making themselves repulsive to their generation’s accomplished and ambitious women, child-men effectively opt out of dating pools in which they might find accomplished and ambitious lifemates. (Exactly who sleeps with these pizza-munching hampers of smelly underwear, Hymowitz never explains.) Shunning commitment, marriage, and children, child-men refuse the adult responsibilities conducive to a good society that they ought to be embracing at their age. And after wallowing in frat-house life for a decade or so after graduation, they’re more or less incapable — should they capitulate to matrimony — of a belated transformation into responsible husbands and fathers. (Note: While I don’t accept Hymowitz’s premise that traditional marriages form the only true bedrock for a stable society, I think we need a certain percentage of them to keep things going.)

Esthetically, child-men are pretty ugly human beings. But I think Hymowitz judges them a tad harshly by equating them with their entertainment. Yes, guys like their entertainment to be stupidly subversive (Comedy Central’s audience is 70 percent male), but that doesn’t mean they are what their favorite stand-up comics perform. (I like to read crime novels, but I’m neither a detective nor a murderer.) That said, the new kind of young women that so many of us worked hard to raise won’t find many true soul mates in this crowd of losers. Did the liberation of our daughters mean young men would become so creepy that they’d have to go through life alone?

All of this goes back to a momentous social phenomenon that, for some reason, Hymowitz never mentions: the Pill. In the mid-1960s, when the tiny oblong contraceptive pellets dropped from pharmaceutical Olympus into the laps of college girls in the mid-60s, the word “Yes” lost its dread and fear for them. Millions of coeds — and other “nice girls” — decided to chuck “No.”

Sex without commitment, heretofore a male prerogative, turned the joke motto of rakish bachelors, “Why buy the cow you can milk for free?” into one that young women began to answer with, “As a matter of fact, I enjoy being milked and, not to worry myself, I can produce more any time I want to.” Once the Pill was in full circulation, there was no returning to an unforgiving choice between June Cleaver, stuck at home with the kids, or sluthood, with a constant fear of out-of-wedlock pregnancy.

In the almost half-century since the arrival of the pill, the burden of hearth and home (that is, of society’s having enough stable ones), is falling once again on young women. They’re the ones who are going to have to demand better, more mature, more responsible, yes, even more sanitary conduct on the part of the new horde of child-men before they have anything serious — especially sex — to do with them. Perhaps a mandatory study of Lysistrata, where women could learn about collective female power when sex is withheld, is in order. Otherwise, they’re condemned to trying to find suitable candidates for love and marriage amid the trash of a beer-sodden NFL pizza party.

Posted at 07:46:37 AM on February 11, 2008 | All postings by Laurie Fendrich

Comments

  1. wow, to read the above writeup, makes me wonder whether the writer is a lisbo, a punk,or a bitter frigid individual. whatever the reason, i think its totally an over reaction and yes, this generation will turn out just fine and contribute just well to society.. if you doubt me, take a look around, MAJORITY of them are active contributors and participants to the community in which the live.

    — cj smith · Feb 11, 08:41 AM · #

  2. CJ—your initial sentence speaks volumes about your maturity level. It’s laughable and so ignorant.
    Yes, there are plenty of guys in that age bracket who contribute—I have taught many of them. But in my years of teaching I have also seen a decline in the maturity level and responsibility of many of these young men (including one of my close relatives—he is a good guy but so immature). And yes, there are plenty of young women who are failing in maturity as well. I think this blog makes an excellent point about the downward spiral of some of these young men today.

    — Ann · Feb 11, 10:23 AM · #

  3. well ann, you are so right about your experience teaching some of these guys, i am one of them and i hold down a six figure job and have a family. but my point is that we have an equally large (or small, if you may) number of women who are and behave exactly the same. the problem is not gender specific (as the initial article stated),.. dont you get it?

    — cj smith · Feb 11, 12:03 PM · #

  4. As a woman, you would commit Jigai and the male would commit Seppuku, but either way, both would be equal in death – the great leveler of all this poppycock… boys will be boys and girls will be girls and then we all forget that when we become men and women. We develop differently – celebrate it, paint it, sing it.

    — RAB · Feb 11, 12:07 PM · #

  5. Are you suggesting a return to sexual modesty??? That women should NOT sleep with men until they get what THEY want out of the relationship? As a man, I don’t like that idea at all. Not little bit.

    — mn · Feb 11, 02:15 PM · #

  6. I think that with the marriage age rising for both sexes, the 20s have become something of an extended young adulthood. It’s easy to understand why people would want to avoid adult responsibilities for as long as possible; what allows it to happen is that our society is more focused on making sure that people can hold down a job than promoting maturity. Nowadays colleges tend to train people to have skills, not to be better human beings. Out in the real world, those skills are what count towards getting you a good job. And once you get that good, six-figure job, virtually any amount of imbecility will be tolerated by the sycophants with which you surround yourself to reaffirm your by then inflated ego.
    But lest we look back fondly on the early ’70s as our social standard, let me add that I doubt that either higher ed or the decline in marriage are the sole causes of this phenomenon. It’s extremely difficult to have a family in your 20s nowadays—all those years of higher ed to get a job that would allow you to afford it, plus the cost of actually having kids. Last I heard, it cost $10K in hospital bills for the birth of child…

    — madame smartypants · Feb 12, 05:07 AM · #

  7. It would appear that Christina Hoff Summers was correct:

    “We have to find our way back to common sense and away from treating “being a boy” as a disorder in need of a cure .”

    — Peter Naegele · Feb 12, 05:29 AM · #

  8. Wait a second—There are just as many female pigs out there as male pigs. Where are the women these guys are having relations with? Removal of censorship on public airways has celebrated if not encouraged lowest common denominator behavior. How come the women of ‘Sex and the City’ is not being criticized in the same way? They are pretty but their behaviour is just as repugnant.

    Then after a while we ‘grow up’ to be mature family pigs that can not (!) survive with out 3 SUVs, a 4000 square foot house and multiple microwaves, refrigerators, TV’s etc.

    Self-control and self-sacrifice have never been popular since the beginning of time. But they are the keys to long-term success and prosperity. If we as Americans lose this as a core value, rest assured want will be imposed upon us by ourselves or other nations.

    — Common Sense · Feb 12, 05:43 AM · #

  9. Oh, please! All of you apologists for the immature white male need to take a hard look at the direction American society is going in. What do these overgrown adolescents grow up to become in middle age? George W. Bush! As a college professor for 20 years, I have long since noticed that my female students outpace my male students by far. What I have also noticed is that when the rare mature white male student appears and accepts responsibility, he is lauded by one and all as the second coming. Meanwhile the hardworking female students who consistently produce exceptional work get a pat on the head and little to no fanfare. It’s sickening! I think this is an excellent and long overdue critique of mainstream American culture. Similar critiques have been lodged at African American culture for more than 20 years. My only complaint about this article is that it does not take the race and class analysis nearly far enough. What the author does not say is that as soon as these imbecilic white males decide to either get their act together or appear as if they have gotten their act together, American society is waiting for them with open arms. This is why CJ, a poster above, can land a “six-figure” job. African American males who extend their adolescence are met with a very different reception when they finally grow up.

    — raymond · Feb 12, 06:25 AM · #

  10. Well-said, Raymond. And for all those apologists who just tell us not to worry — that this is just the direction our society is headed — I say that I am VERY worried. Getting out of work/responsibility seems to be the goal of the described slackers in the article. I see it every day in the classroom. They want to put off learning and working and fatherhood as long as possible… and plan to retire as soon as possible and get back to their video games and Comedy Central. They don’t seem to realize that their economic model will never sustain a society.

    — K. Tribble · Feb 12, 08:27 AM · #

  11. Hello: those “driven” career women are having sex with someone and it IS those same so-called immature men. So, people are getting married later, “having fun” for a longer period of time/delaying having kids. It’s better to have kids/serious relationships when one feels ready as opposed to when some artificial societal desire tells you to.

    — Please · Feb 12, 09:16 AM · #

  12. It must be said yet again:
    Sleeping around is not — and never has been — feminism.

    — jje · Feb 12, 09:52 AM · #

  13. raymond, your post echoes exactly what’s happening in the Demoncratic nomination process. Here we have a woman who has worked hard her entire life, on exactly the issues the electorate deems important, and she can’t win, no matter what she does. She’s either too “feminine” or too “strident”, as if those qualities make a frog-hair’s worth of difference in whether she can (and would, IMHO) do a good job as president. And her opponent, while certainly not much like the child-men described in the article, is a man who has three or four years of national experience at best. And who is being clebrated as the second coming of JFK! (Who had his own Peter Panish issues.) And BECAUSE he is a “clean” (sic) African American, he slides right into all of our society’s desires to be diverse—as long as that doesn’t take us too far out of our comfort zone. The whole thing makes me sad and tired.

    — barbara · Feb 12, 10:31 AM · #

  14. The country’s up to its ears in bright, ambitious young men who are earnest, and stalwart. These “party-on Garth” types are the anti-particles to this phenomenon. Maybe it’s social Gaia. As Kramer once observed, “You’re Even Steven.”

    — marci · Feb 12, 11:08 AM · #

  15. This isn’t about being a boy, this is about failing to become a man. And it might not matter for you men out there if it takes a decade or two extra to decide YOU are ready to settle down, but women don’t really have that option. There’s a reason adulthood in the past and in less technologically advanced areas arrives not long after puberty. I don’t know about the rest of the women in the world, but I can tell you that my ideal is not settling for someone to meet my biological time range for reproduction who is decades older than me or totally incapable of helping me raise a child.

    I wish it wasn’t, but it’s absolutely true that we’ve become stronger women only to be confronted with a worthless breed of man.

    Women may behave badly as well, but don’t blame the ones sleeping with these losers—the sexual revolution was growth towards equality and we have the right to have sex when we want to without shame, guilt, or physical danger, but all of this means… well, frankly, we have to get it somewhere. These men seem to be the only option, which is why they keep getting laid, which is why they keep behaving in this immature manner for decades longer than they should.

    — K · Feb 12, 11:16 AM · #

  16. As a young woman, I can testify that while I love my guy friends, I consider very few of them dateable. They’re rarely willing to try anything new, they’re apathetic about anything that doesn’t touch their daily lives, and they feed on each other’s homophobia and sexism (which are benign and practically inevitable, in their minds). I don’t know whose fault it is, but fankly, it can be hard to distinguish one child-man from another.

    Sure, we sometimes date or hook up with those guys because they seem to be our only option. But that doesn’t mean we don’t find them disappointing.

    — bjg · Feb 12, 11:24 AM · #

  17. As long as we keep getting what we want we have no incentive to change. As a proud feminist (male), I salute every sexually liberated woman who sleeps with me.

    — mn · Feb 12, 03:51 PM · #

  18. I didn’t know that if you enjoyed video games, liked beer, or enjoyed Maxim, that meant you lacked ambition. I enjoy all of those things, and I’m very ambitious. I just find it hilarious that women like Hymowitz sit there and get on men, but laud women for similar behavior. No one says anything about the vapid women who think American Idol is legit entertainment, or the 4 women on “Sex and the City”, even though they are doing the exact same things that men my age do. We want to work hard, make good money, and get to sleep with as many attractive women as we possibly can. There’s nothing wrong with that..Just because a man doesn’t want to get married, have children, and live a boring suburban life doesn’t make that man a failure. What’s in it for me? Getting married won’t really significantly improve my life. I don’t need another mother, I lived with one for 17 years before I went off to college. I can cook, clean, and do all of those things myself. And, if a marriage doesn’t work out, financial ruin is on tap in a large majority of cases. I didn’t work hard in undergrad, I’m not going to work hard in Law School for the next 2 years, just for someone to benefit from it, just because she decided to spread her legs. There’s plenty of men out there who are willing to be bored to death in a marriage, most of them are poor, and most of them didn’t graduate college..Go chase those guys, women, they’re out there..The guys who went and got their degrees, and what not will stay single, because we realize that we can get all the things we want without ever getting married. If I want children one day, I can easily adopt, I can easily get a surrogate mother to bear my children, I can do all sorts of things, and not have to go through the stress of a marriage. When Marriage becomes a good deal for me, then I’ll think about it. At this point, it’s not a good deal for me, or most men who are accomplished, or will have that status one day. Until then, I won’t even go near it.

    — Kevin Erickson · Feb 13, 12:15 AM · #

  19. A:traditional marriages form the only true bedrock for a stable society.
    B: “the rare mature white male student (who) appears and accepts responsibility” “is lauded by one and all as the second coming” (post 9) but doesn’t get sex because most idiotic females would rather sleep with “bad boys” and scare the good ones off.Thank goodness I found the rare, mature white female who believes “A”. The women of “sex and the city” are sluts.Women (and men) can be mature, responsible and CHOOSY and still be feminists.

    — Not all men are promiscuous, either. · Feb 13, 11:43 AM · #

  20. Many of this country’s brightest, most serious, responsible and idealistic young men (and more than a few women) are serving in our military in Iraq and other places. Instead of celebrating their remarkable achievements in hellish environments, the left infantilizes them by making them seem like poor dupes roped in to someone else’s war. Want to see remarkable, fully developed 19 year old men? Go to Baghdad.

    — Matt · Feb 13, 04:01 PM · #

  21. Interesting article, though somewhat extreme. Most of the young men I know don’t really fit that description, thank god. But then, perhpas I know atypical young men? But #18 Poster above, Kevin, is a sad example of what some of those boorish young men are becoming: angry, selfish adults who are incapable of intimacy and tenderness, even toward themselves. That is sad for them but even sadder for the society to which they belong.
    In Boys Adrift, child psychologist Leonard Sax talks about how, 40 or 50 years ago, we had many mechanisms to deliver the message to boys that one deeply important part of being a man means using your strength in the service of others. We no longer have those mechanisms in place, and the marketplace fills the vacuum.

    — Karen Connelly · Feb 14, 10:17 AM · #

  22. Men behaving badly , well into adulthood, is happening all over the world, and causing women everywhere to expect less, quit looking and realize that there are not enough mature ones to go around. However ,do note that Ms Fendrich’s hypothesis assigns much of the blame to an excess of promiscous women.

    — Bill Pigman · Feb 16, 05:51 AM · #

  23. Sleeping. Around. Is. Not. Feminism.

    sigh.

    — jje · Feb 16, 01:27 PM · #

  24. The word Ms. Fendrich is looking for is “gentleman”, or, perhaps better, the Yiddish word “mensch”.

    A gentleman, or a “mensch”, is not necessarily rich or professionally successful. You can be a street sweeper and still be a “mensch”, or a millionaire and not be gentlemen. What he is, however, is grown-up, decent, loyal to his wife and children, has self-control, and is involved in his neighorhood and workplace.

    Such child-men are not the result of a “backlash against feminism”, however, but a logical result of feminist dogma. When women sleeping around is seen as “liberation” and being a gentleman is considered “sexist” and “misogynic”, it is little wonder men find no reason to bear the responsibilites of being a gentleman. They have both sex at will, and feminist approval, as child-men; they will lose both if they become gentlemen.

    — Skeptic · Feb 19, 02:55 AM · #

  25. “Women were made to be wooed, not to woo.” Decades of feminism, political indoctrination, wishful thinking, and whining will NOT change human nature.

    Sexuality researcher/professor, Dr. Cindy Struckman-Johnson, does a revealing activity every year in her human sexuality class. She asks the class (a very large lecture format) to choose 10 female and 10 male representatives to come on stage and answer various questions. They answer by stepping forward for “yes”/ backwards for “no.” or something similar, until they’re used to answering/moving quickly. Then, for the real point of the activity: If you had sex with a person on the first date, would you want to have a serious committed relationship with that person. EVERY year, EVERY class, it’s the same response: the women step forward for “yes,” and the men step backwards for “no.”

    Sexually “liberated” women don’t want to hear that, and definitely don’t want to adjust their lifestyles accordingly. Despite it being proven repeatedly all around us, many refuse to acknowledge that the type of man who wants to marry and have a family would prefer to work for/pursue/chase/woo a highly esteemed woman, rather than make the most serious earthly commitment of his life with someone who jumps from bed to bed, treating her sexuality like a cheap commodity.

    When women aren’t around, men are pigs—look at the American West in frontier days. But men will rise to the expectations necessary for sexual relations. If it makes you angry to read that, it’s because it’s touching a sore spot—truth that you’d like to deny.

    — SD Farmboy · Feb 20, 05:47 AM · #

  26. What is really worrying about your story is that it seems perfectly normal to both sexes to have sex on the first date. They just disagree on whether it would lead to a “serious relationship” or not.

    Neither the men nor the women seem to realize it’s a bad idea as such to have sex with a more-or-less perfect stranger two hours after you’ve met them.

    Weird.

    — Skeptic · Feb 20, 06:18 AM · #

  27. Just last night, a man came up to me at a party. He introduced himself to me very politely. He informed me he was from upstate New York and that his mother raised him to be a gentleman. This was the moment that I started being amused by our encounter. He proceeded to ask about the man I was with. Was he my boyfriend? Upon finding out that he was, the stranger smiled, looked me straight in the eye and went, “We were just wondering, how did that happen?” Being an undergrad student, encounters with men who are less than savory are not exactly rare. Undergraduate years seem to be the time when boys really become “child-men.” They have no respect, no ethic and no motivation or drive. I know scores of males who are perfectly content getting C’s in classes, playing Xbox and drinking as much beer as humanly possible. The typical twentysomething male sleeps all day and drinks all night, expecting to get laid and rich along the way. The real problem seems to be the initial distancing from any sort or rules or guidelines. People go off to college and are suddenly devoid of anyone telling them what to do or how to act. Males are surrounded by other males who act the exact same way, and with the excess of booze and lack of any real social expectations, are encouraged in their activities. Their actions become socially acceptable. People believe that once graduating college males will magically “grow up”, but in reality once they do graduate they realize there is still no one forcing them to do so. They take up a day job and continue in their partying ways during nights and weekends. They are slobs in every sense of the word. They refuse to take on any responsibility because they never had to before, and they’ve been doing just fine. While women are out making a living and working hard, men are getting drunk. They don’t see sleeping around as a problem because “women do it too”. Yes, women openly have sex now too. Girls are going on the pill in late middle and early high school. They are becoming sexually active younger, but can society really blame the lack of decent men on birth control? Surely women’s sex lives can’t be completely to blame for men’s bachelor-hood. Women have crawled their way up social ranks. We can now vote, enlist in the army, hold almost any job a man can, and get educated. With this came other freedom, such as a sex life. But while we were improving our place in society, were the men so anti-change that they regressed into the worst form of bachelors? Is the fact that women no longer have the patience or time to deal with men’s immaturity what has caused this downfall, or is it just what men have evolved into? Either way is it really acceptable for men to act so superior? A male can have a great job and live in the best penthouse apartment in Manhattan, but if he goes to a bar and expects a girl to come home with him simply because “he is the man,” then he is a “child-man.” Being one doesn’t imply financial failure or lack or a job, it is simply an attitude. The arrogance and sense of entitlement is what set’s a “child-man” apart from a man. The attitude that makes up the posts of those such as Kevin and CJ is what makes a “child-man.” Think of it this way, have you ever heard of a man not being able to find a relationship because there is no one mature enough or respectful enough? No. And yes, there are women out there acting like pigs, but they aren’t effecting main stream society in such a powerful way.

    — Lauren · Feb 24, 02:42 PM · #

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