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.
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....
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.
I'd like to see some backup to this statistic. I'm not sure what they mean by "young" for example. I've worked in a major city for over ten years with hundreds of companies and for the most part the men have the offices and the women have the cubicles.
As someone who’s 45 and not married, who is a selling writer of short stories and continues to pursue publication of novels while I work with boys removed from abusive homes and/or who have drug and/or criminal backgrounds...
I liked the book, but after a while I started skimming. The author has good things to say, but while talking about how boy/men live in a world of computer games and college fratboy humor well into their thirties (she’s right on her descriptions of boys who don’t grow up), she has a really annoying habit of using examples from movies and celebrity culture as examples of how things should be. It’s like her problem isn’t with boy/men, but that they don’t watch the right TV shows.
Women are pretty much perfect and just frustrated with the men, according to the book, but her oversimplification of so many issues was frustrating. I see and work with the types of males who are the problem she talks about, but she keeps hitting on this narrow view of what a man HAS to conform to in order to have a ‘real’ life.
Well, no. There are options for all. Folks like me are outside the norm, and I am a decent citizen who isn’t playing video games and watching TV. I didn’t expect the book to talk about folks like me, but I was a little startled by her repetition of the illustration of these awesome, smart, grown-up women, and all these darned MEN who won’t do what she wants them to do.
The author should have been more comprehensive, or she should have made this an op-ed piece. In the end, I thought she missed a great opportunity to show how media, as a previous poster mentioned, has become all-consuming ni the lives of males AND females. All their references are pop culture, with so little connection to local community, physical labor, non-organized sporting, reading the classics AND reading for pleasure. We’re sexualizing kids, both girls AND boys, and telling them that gender is just a construct of the patriarchy, that all religions are the same, etc. etc.
There are so many things to incorporate in this kind of study, and she kept the focus on these boy-men playing their video games. That’s not the whole story by a mile.
Typical female point of view. In a more robust and clear-eyed age, the "traditional test of manhood" had more to do with joining the military and putting one's life on the line for his country. Nowadays, "Call to Duty" is merely a videogame.
Does this article report a truth? Every aspect of Western Civilization is under assault and that of course includes the relations between the sexes. Whatever is happening reflects the constant assault through all aspects of the media such as film, TV, the schools, the courts, the bureaucracy
An interesting commentary today on Fox related to this is that the kids are not much smarter leaving college then when they entered. This then makes college simply a means to pay teachers salaries and bennies. In such case, college is not needed. Of course, this is a broad generalization, but has some merit, especially in the high school venue as well.
The culture has decided men are unnecessary.
A lot of this is perception. There are many men in the country. The problem is, the country sees only buffoon-men on ‘tha tee vee’ and in the movies. We watch gangsta’s in music videos. SNAGs abound, to be sure, as do 30-year-old momma’s basement dwellers. But ‘men’ are not stuck in adolescence and more than ‘women’ are all more reasoned, well-educated, and mature.
Why get married? My lawyer will tell you that getting married is nothing but a legal disadvantage for a man. Sorry but I would rather have relationships without the legal entanglements. The feminists have have made this bed and I could care less about them having to sleep in it one way or the other. I am free and thats all that matters. I know this sounds harsh but its the stark reality of a fast food fast life and fast sex culture. I am only adapting to it. No apologies and no regrets...
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Frustrated women writing a variety of tomes documenting the perceived inadequacies of men has long since become a cottage industry.
If women want men to act “more like men” then perhaps they should try acting more like women.