Posted on 07/03/2011 9:53:55 AM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin
(One author says the man-child trend isn't just material for Seth Rogen, it's a nationwide epidemic.)
Has the rise of powerful women turned men into boys? This is the question author Kay Hymowitz asks in her provocative new book, Manning Up. Hymowitz argues that men today are free from the traditional tests of manhood—marrying and providing for children—and this freedom comes at a price: an increasing number of men are stuck in a state of permanent adolescence.
The statistics are shocking. Colleges are reducing the standards for male applicants to balance out the majority of incoming women. Among Americans 25 to 34, 34 percent of women have bachelor's degrees compared to 27 percent of men. Young women in major cities earn more than fifteen times more than their male peers. And before you think this is good news for women, it also means that the field of eligible bachelors is dwindling while the demand for Seth Rogen comedies is exploding.
So, why are men failing to grow up? Is it the fault of radical feminists? Is it the fault of the media? ...Should we blame Canada?
Hymowitz argues that the real problem is our changing culture, which has become detrimental to men. Fifty years ago, men in their mid-to-late twenties were expected to be financially independent, married, and well on their way to starting families. Society expected men to grow up—so they did.
The "knowledge economy" has changed all that. The modern world encourages people to stay in school well into their twenties, all the while accumulating debt that makes it even harder to become financially independent and start a family. Plus, the skills required by a knowledge economy are skills that come more naturally to women. Jobs like those in the design and communication fields emphasize traditionally feminine skill sets. Even the traditional male bastions of law and management are becoming increasingly dominated by women.
Instead, today's men are tending to live lives free of most responsibility. Hymowitz criticizes the empty male culture of Maxim magazine, Spike TV, and lives lived with frat-boy abandon. Instead of shouldering responsibility, many American males have become experts at shirking it.
It's easy for women to say that the turnabout is fair play, but the fact is this: our economy and our culture are not well-served by a lost generation of American men. A healthy society needs a mix of masculine and feminine values. It was stereotypically masculine daring that invented the Internet and landed men on the moon, and women have reasons of self-interest to want a change in affairs, not the least being the desire for a responsible, dependable romantic partner.
Hymowitz observes how many women are finding the dating scene filled with men who are far from marriageable material. Biology and culture have conspired to make women naturally want to seek higher-status males—a natural biological imperative to find mates that can take care of future offspring. In other words, women don't usually want to "marry down." But what happens when the supply of marriageable men is incredibly low? We are about to find out.
What may well happen is a vicious cycle: as the supply of marriageable college-educated men dwindles, more and more women will decide that they just don’t need men in their lives. This is already starting to happen. There is an increasing trend of women choosing to become single mothers. And the more women who opt out of marriage, the more it encourages men to do the same.
What can we do to arrest these trends? Firstly, we need to fix our educational system. Right now, 60 percent of new college entrants are women, and men are falling further and further behind. This is not a tolerable outcome. Our education system is failing American men in the same way that it once failed women. Secondly, we need a cultural shift. Popular culture may not be the driving reason men are falling behind, but it certainly doesn’t help. Culture needs to put more value on men as husbands and fathers rather than man-children.
People in today’s society are marrying and having children later than ever before, and we don’t really understand the effect that has on society as a whole. Hymowitz’s warnings may be overblown, but leaving an entire generation of American males in a state of semi-adolescence serves neither men nor women.
Yep, we need a woman president.
Yes, I definitely think we should blame Canada.
Most of the women are majoring in humanities.
The degrees they are getting are a joke.
A college education isn't what it used to be. It is a degree in political correctness.
You can't make a living with PC, unless you work for the government.
Affirmative action for men?
Good point. They have these degrees in Women’s Studies, for example.
The study of women may be fascinating, but, there are entire departments and degree programs in this?
How many jobs in the economy are out there where they look for degrees in Women’s Studies?
The same is true of various ethnic studies programs. While it may be interesting on some level to study these issues, how does someone get a job with such degrees as a credential?
Sadly, this article describes most of the guys that I grew up and went to school with. Just about all of them have went without being married, having any children, or being successful at anything other than video games. It’s as if they all had(have) some sort of pathological ‘fear’ of growing up or having any real responsibility.
Tried my best to get some of them to go to college, to no avail. Now I sit back and watch them all suck from a distance.
sex is expected from everyone and there is no emotional or mental attachment to it...
the Playboy culture......notice since the Playboy culture came along that its been a slow deterioration....the "pill" and then the widespread use of abortion...
everything aimed at enabling sexual encounters without the worry of a baby...
and "Hooters" the "family" restaurant is just a prime example of our culture...
..you can take your entire family with little boys and little girls and the lesson they learn is: girls have only one value and that "value" is to be displayed openly and freely at all times for the entertainment of boys and men..
you can call it the "feminizing" of America but in reality, its been the "anti-feminization" of America, because every single "achievement" by women has been a dear cost to them.
"hooking"up the expected norm, not dating, and courting, and flowers and candy, increasingly working at a job plus raising a family and keeping the house,higher rates of divorces, higher rates of cancer and other illnesses usually associated with men, shoot, even higher insurance rates....
,..and what the Playboy philosophy pushed is now a reality ......boys and men have endless opportunities for sexual gratification....the only "cost" to them is their manhood and their souls....
we have one
Part of this is also due to people’s attitudes in other areas of life. For example, many twenty something and even thirty something single young people still live with parents. Living with parents well into adulthood can really put someone in perpetual adolescence.
I’m sure part of that is due to saving money by living with Mom and Dad, however, past generations wanted to live independently and establish their adult lives. And take responsibility for the fact that they would have to manage their money to make ends meet if they were living on their own and being self supporting.
I was talking to a 27 year old unmarried woman, friend of the family recently about marriage. She’s not seeing anybody, and not looking at marriage and family as a goal. She was surprised to hear that a friend from school a couple years younger than her was married. She said she couldn’t imagine being married at only 25.
We could even talk about sex. Between a hook-up culture and birth control enabling casual encounters with little risk, people think about sex differently. Young people look at sex as something that they want to participate in, but don’t consider the marriage relation to that subject.
And I’m sure you’re *such* a prize.
“You can’t make a living with PC, unless you work for the government. “
Sure you can. Corporations are FILLED with nothing but PC. Where else can a ‘Senior Engineering Manager’ have absolutely no engineering experience or experience with the company’s business and possess only a liberal arts “Business Communications” degree and a 12 week wonder Project Management Professional certificate and make $100,000+ playing Buzzword Bingo and making friends while failing to actually manage anything or produce a product?
I played consultant, from an engineer to a trusted advisor role to executive management, to over 200 companies through 25+ years and have seen this type of thing at all but maybe 5 companies.
I remember reading once about an indian tribe who used to take their adolescent boys out into the woods for a ceremony when they were around 14 years old. Expectations of manhood were explained to them in a ceremonial fashion and the event culminated with leaving them for several weeks all alone to fend for themselves. When they came back, all of their toys and articles of their childhood had been taken away. They were expected to be Men from that point on. Girls have their "transition" built in biologically. Boys really don't, unless the society marks one.
Who the F* is "Seth Rogen?" Anyone who knows probably needs to get a life.
The premise of the article is sound. When the average age of videogame players is approaching 30, as it is today, and mostly male, you know the culture has been hollowed out.
Liberalism has destroyed most women, as it has most every aspect of life in modern America.
Seth Rogan is Canadian.
That’s an insult to women.
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