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Men Stuck In Adolescence: Why It's Everyone's Problem
Your Tango ^ | Today | Jay Reding

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.


TOPICS: Conspiracy; Society
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To: Salgak
Men have been studying women since the dawn of time, but to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever figured out how they operate.


81 posted on 07/04/2011 5:41:15 AM PDT by Fresh Wind ('People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook.' Richard M. Nixon)
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To: Jonty30
Which is why many men, at 40, might still live with their parents. What’s the point of getting your own apartment when how you live won’t change, except cost you an extra 600 dollars a month.

...blink...blink...
82 posted on 07/04/2011 5:47:04 AM PDT by Vision ("Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?" John 11:40)
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To: redpoll
You makes some good points. Also, nobody talks about how expensive children have become. What's the average college degree nowadays? $75k?
83 posted on 07/04/2011 5:50:56 AM PDT by Vision ("Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?" John 11:40)
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To: Fred Hayek

Same here, The gov-mint has provided affirmative action jobs for our nations blacks since FDR, all hired because they were black. In order to elevate the female population the affirmative action machine was used to make a company hire women.

Companies hired blacks and women because they were required by the gov-mint to do so.

Now it’s time to fire both these folks because they are useless!


84 posted on 07/04/2011 5:53:30 AM PDT by tiger63
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To: Diana in Wisconsin
—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.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Part of the problem is that education continues into the twenties and even the thirties for both men and women. It was rare in my parents generation for people to go to college. They received training in high school or on the job. Many in my parents generation left school after the 8th grade.

This demand for a high school diploma, lack of training for young people, the high illiteracy and innumeracy is **PLANNED**! The Gramascian Marxists love it because it means delayed entrance into adulthood, high amounts of sexual activity outside of marriage, and further destruction of normal formation of families and home ownership. And....Overgrown Peter Pans on the campuses are an every ready rabble for fomenting Marxist revolution.

85 posted on 07/04/2011 6:01:44 AM PDT by wintertime
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To: redpoll
Your post is dead on. You should write book. Most women do not have clue on the lack of opportunity there is for males. For most men, it is the opposite of what they think. Unless a male is born with certain physical and or financial assets, the life can be lonely.

What makes it worse, and I am going out on a limb here too, is prostitution is illegal. It should be legal and safe IMO. Flame on.

86 posted on 07/04/2011 6:03:52 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: Talisker
Men aren't failing to grow up - women are.

This is true in many cases. I know a few twenty something women and they are emotionally 5 - 10 years old. I'm not joking.
87 posted on 07/04/2011 6:04:19 AM PDT by Vision ("Did I not say to you that if you would believe, you would see the glory of God?" John 11:40)
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To: NoControllingLegalAuthority

The perfect new age man.

88 posted on 07/04/2011 6:17:06 AM PDT by central_va ( I won't be reconstructed and I do not give a damn.)
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To: warchild9

“AA is not a problem in the real, non-FR, world.”

This is the real world dude!


89 posted on 07/04/2011 6:43:03 AM PDT by antisocial (Texas SCV - Deo Vindice)
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To: warchild9

To further disabuse you of the “AA is not a problem in the real, non-FR, world.” psychosis, here is an abstract of a paper regarding just one of the many fetid aspects of AA.

Amy L. Wax, Social Science Research Network, May 5, 2011

Abstract:

In Ricci v. DeStefano, 129 S. Ct. 2658 (2009), the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed the doctrine, first articulated by the Court in Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424 (1971), that employers can be held liable under Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act for neutral personnel practices with a disparate impact on minority workers. The Griggs Court further held that employers can escape liability by showing that their staffing practices are job related or consistent with business necessity.

In the interim since Griggs, social scientists have generated evidence undermining two key assumptions behind that decision and its progeny. First, the Court in Griggs noted the absence of evidence that the selection criteria in that case (a high school diploma and an aptitude test) were related to subsequent performance of the service jobs at issue, and expressed doubt about the existence of such a link. But research in industrial and organization psychology (IOP) has repeatedly documented that tests and criteria such as those at issue in Griggs (which are heavily “g”-loaded and thus dependent on cognitive ability) remain the best predictors of performance for jobs at all levels of complexity. Second, Griggs and its progeny rest on the implicit assumption, reflected in the so-called 4/5 rule, that fair and valid hiring criteria will result in a workplace that roughly reflects the representation of each group in the background population. Work in psychometrics and labor economics shows that this assumption is unjustified. Because blacks lag significantly behind whites on measures of cognitive ability, most valid job selection criteria will have a substantial adverse impact on this group. The combination of well-documented racial differences in cognitive ability and the consistent link between ability and job performance generates a pattern that experts term “the validity-diversity tradeoff”: job selection devices that best predict future job performance generate the smallest number of minority hires in a broad range of positions. Indeed, the evidence indicates that most valid screening devices will have a significant adverse impact on blacks and will also violate the 4/5 rule under the law of disparate impact.

Because legitimately meritocratic (that is, job-related) job selection practices will routinely trigger prima facie violations of the disparate impact rule, employers who adopt such practices run the risk of being required to justify them—a costly and difficult task that encourages undesirable, self-protective behaviors and may result in unwarranted liability. To alleviate this burden, the article proposes to adopt a new regime of “disparate impact realism” that abandons the 4/5 rule in favor of sliding scale ratios pegged to measured disparities in group performance and the selectivity of particular positions. Alternatively, the disparate impact rule should be repealed altogether. The data indicate that pronounced differences in the background distribution of skill and human capital, not arbitrary hurdles imposed by employers, are the principle factor behind racial imbalances in most jobs. Moreover, blacks lag behind whites in actual on-the-job performance, which indicates that employers are not unfairly excluding minorities from the workforce but rather bending over backwards to include them. Disparate impact litigation, which does nothing to correct existing disparities and distracts from the task of addressing them, represents a cumbersome, misplaced effort that could better be directed at the root causes of workforce racial imbalance.

[Editor’s Note: A draft of the full paper is available here. The final version is forthcoming in the Winter 2011 issue of the William and Mary Law Review.]


90 posted on 07/04/2011 8:21:46 AM PDT by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: Diana in Wisconsin

“Cultures” don’t decide anything. A relatively small group of people got control of the culture manufacturing institutions and have imposed a delusional view of reality that will lead to chaos, as all forms of false consciousness do.

Women cannot create or sustain an advanced civilization or economy. They have lowered standards everywhere while creating barriers to excellence. Feminized cultures are cultures in decline. If you want to see the future, look at our ghettos or the Chavs and Yobs in Britain.


91 posted on 07/04/2011 8:32:14 AM PDT by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: antisocial

Hey, dude, go to a real college and learn the truth, dude!


92 posted on 07/04/2011 9:48:17 AM PDT by warchild9
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To: achilles2000

Hysteria. My experience and my contacts trump cherry-picked documents.

I’ve NEVER had a problem with my gender/race in academia.

Now, when I was working in the unbelievably corrupt world of Big Pharma, that was a serious problem. Fortunately, I had a mentor who covered my hinder and let me concentrate on my work.


93 posted on 07/04/2011 9:50:25 AM PDT by warchild9
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To: warchild9

Your alleged personal experience is irrelevant to the systematic data, for which, I might add, we have very clear causal explanations. Academia is at least as aggressive in AA as fire and police departments and other government institutions in discriminating in favor of favored minorities. Large corporations are about as bad.


94 posted on 07/04/2011 12:02:11 PM PDT by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: Diana in Wisconsin
Diana, you are an exception to the rule I think. And it certainly does not make me feel better. I think that adultery laws should be enforced and it should count against a person if a divorce is being considered before the court.

Almost always the courts side with the female especially if children are involved.

95 posted on 07/04/2011 12:02:47 PM PDT by ColdSteelTalon (Light is fading to shadow, and casting its shroud over all we have known...)
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To: Diana in Wisconsin

“But I can still hunt, and shoot and use my chainsaw and all that, Right?”

Fine by me, Diana - as long as I can borrow your mascara and lipstick once in a while! ;-)


96 posted on 07/04/2011 2:29:15 PM PDT by Jack Hammer
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To: ColdSteelTalon

Yep. Too bad *I* had to be the responsible adult in this story...but taking the High Road (more than not) has paid off for the long run. :)


97 posted on 07/04/2011 2:51:22 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin (I don't have 'Hobbies.' I'm developing a robust Post-Apocalyptic skill set...)
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To: Jack Hammer

Um...Okay? LOL!


98 posted on 07/04/2011 2:52:26 PM PDT by Diana in Wisconsin (I don't have 'Hobbies.' I'm developing a robust Post-Apocalyptic skill set...)
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To: Diana in Wisconsin

Funny how no one is placing blame where it belongs - the fÉderal reserve, govt, pc society to where most young men simply can’t make enough to support a household and family and instead just hang out. Its not the best thing, but its the truthful thing.

The housing bubble priced out millions of people as well and we blame thosde who chose to stay home as opposed to buying into that scam? Ha ha ha ha - who is the real idiot now?

If any of the holier than thou types want a real answer - look to the govt and banks who have devalued the dollar, devauled work, sent typical male jobs overseas, etc.


99 posted on 07/04/2011 3:08:16 PM PDT by GlockThe Vote (The Obama Adminstration: The flash mob who wonÂ’t leave.)
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To: Diana in Wisconsin

I just farted.......he he he


100 posted on 07/04/2011 3:11:39 PM PDT by Vermont Lt (Is there anyone that Obama won't toss under the bus?)
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