- It's 1965 and you're a 26-year-old white guy. You have
a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you're
married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high
school, where she was in your sister's class. You've already got one kid,
with another on the way. For now, you're renting an apartment in your parents'
two-family house, but you're saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house
in the next town. Yup, you're an adult!
-
- Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You've
finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services
firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare
time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie
songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower,
massage some product into your hair and face--and then it's off to bars
and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues
and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia.
Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?
-
- Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had
achieved most of adulthood's milestones--high school degree, financial
independence, marriage, and children. These days, he lingers--happily--in
a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.
Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in
fact it is to the early twenty-first century what adolescence was to the
early twentieth: a momentous sociological development of profound economic
and cultural import. Some call this new period "emerging adulthood,"
others "extended adolescence"; David Brooks recently took a stab
with the "Odyssey Years," a "decade of wandering."
-
- But while we grapple with the name, it's time to state
what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: the limbo doesn't
bring out the best in young men. With women, you could argue that adulthood
is in fact emergent. Single women in their twenties and early thirties
are joining an international New Girl Order, hyperachieving in both school
and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours
with shopping, traveling, and dining with friends [see "The New Girl
Order," Autumn 2007]. Single Young Males, or SYMs, by contrast, often
seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo
3, and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though
it's receding.
-
- Freud famously asked: "What do women want?"
Notice that he didn't ask what men wanted--perhaps he thought
that he'd figured that one out. But that's a question that ad people, media
execs, and cultural entrepreneurs have pondered a lot in recent years.
They're particularly interested in single young men, for two reasons: there
are a lot more of them than before; and they tend to have some extra change.
Consider: in 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old
white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively.
And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read
this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men
rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006--a dramatic demographic shift for
such a short time period.
-
- That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully
free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills. Historically, marketers
have found this group an "elusive audience"--the phrase is permanently
affixed to "men between 18 and 34" in adspeak--largely immune
to the pleasures of magazines and television, as well as to shopping expeditions
for the products advertised there. But by the mid-1990s, as SYM ranks swelled,
marketers began to get their number. One signal moment came in April 1997,
when Maxim, a popular British "lad magazine," hit American shores. Maxim strove
to be the anti-Playboy-and-Esquire; bad-boy owner Felix Dennis sniffed
at celebrity publishers with their tired formulas. Instead, he later observed,
the magazine's creators adopted the "astonishing methodology of asking
our readers what they wanted . . . and then supplying it."
-
- And what did those readers--male, unmarried, median age
26, median household income $60,000 or so--want? As the philosophers would
say, duh. Maxim plastered covers and features with pouty-lipped,
tousled-haired pinups in lacy underwear and, in case that didn't do the
trick, block-lettered promises of sex! lust! naughty! And it worked. More
than any men's magazine before or since, Maxim grabbed that elusive 18-
to 34-year-old single-college-educated-guy market, and soon boasted about
2.5 million readers--more than GQ, Esquire, and Men's Journal combined.
-
- Victoria's Secret cover art doesn't fully explain the
SYM's attraction to Maxim. After all, plenty of down-market venues
had the sort of bodacious covers bound to trigger the young male's reptilian
brain. No, what set Maxim apart from other men's mags was its
voice. It was the sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living
room--where put-downs are high-fived; gadgets are cool; rock stars, sports
heroes, and cyborg battles are awesome; jobs and Joni Mitchell suck; and
babes are simply hot--or not. "Are there any cool jobs related to
beer?" a reader's letter asks in a recent issue. Answer: brand manager,
beer tester, and brewmaster.
-
- Maxim asked the SYM what he wanted and learned that
he didn't want to grow up. Whatever else you might say about Playboy or Esquire,
they tried to project the image of a cultured and au courant fellow;
as Hefner famously--and from today's cultural vantage point, risibly--wrote
in an early Playboy, his ideal reader enjoyed "inviting a female
acquaintance in for a quiet discussion of Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex."
Hearing this, the Maxim dude would want to hurl. He'd like to
forget that he ever went to school.
-
- Maxim happily obliges. The editors try to keep readers'
minds from wandering with articles like "Confessions of a Strip Club
Bouncer." But they rely heavily on picture-laden features promoting
the latest skateboards, video games, camcorders, and other tech products,
along with an occasional Q-and-A with, say, Kid Rock--all with the bare
minimum of print required to distinguish a magazine from a shopping catalog
or pinup calendar. Playboy's philosophy may not have been Aristotle,
but it was an attempt, of sorts, to define the good life. The Maxim reader
prefers lists, which make up in brevity what they lose in thought: "Ten
Greatest Video Game Heroes of All Time," "The Five Unsexiest
Women Alive," "Sixteen People Who Look Like They Absolutely Reek,"
and so on.
-
- Still, Maxim is far from dumb, as its self-mockery
proves. The Maxim child-man prides himself on his lack of pretense,
his unapologetic guyness. The magazine's subtext seems to be: "We're
just a bunch of horny, insensitive guys--so what?" What else to make
of an article entitled "How to Make Your Girlfriend Think Her Cat's
Death Was an Accident"? "The only thing worse than a show about
doctors is a show about sappy chick doctors we're forced to watch or else
our girlfriends won't have sex with us," the editors grumble about
the popular (with women) Grey's Anatomy.
-
- The Maxim child-man voice has gone mainstream,
which may explain why the magazine's sales were flat enough for Dennis
to sell it last summer. You're that 26-year-old who wants sophomoric fun
and macho action? Now the culture has a groaning table of entertainment
with your name on it. Start with the many movies available in every guy-friendly
genre: sci-fi flicks like Transformers, action and crime movies like American
Gangster, comedies like Superbad, and the seemingly endless line of
films starring Adam Sandler, Jim Carrey, and the "Frat Pack,"
as USA Today dubbed the group of young male comedians that includes
Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Owen and Luke Wilson, Jack Black,
and Steve Carell.
-
- With a talent for crude physical comedy, gleeful juvenility,
and self-humiliation, the Frat Packers are the child-man counterparts to
the more conventional leads, like George Clooney and Brad Pitt, whom women
and Esquire editors love. In Old School (2003), three
guys in their thirties decide to start a college fraternity. Frank the
Tank (the moniker refers to his capacity for alcohol), played by Ferrell,
flashes his saggy white derriere streaking through the college town; the
scene is a child-man classic. In 2005'sThe 40-Year-Old Virgin, Carell plays
a middle-aged nerd with a large action-figure collection but no action.
In one guy-favorite scene, a beautician painfully waxes Carell's hirsute
chest; as Carell pointed out later, this was a "guy thing, this sadistic
nature that men have to see other men in non-life-threatening pain."
-
- Even though the networks must be more restrained, television
also has plenty of "stupid fun" (as Maxim calls a regular
feature), gross-out humor, and even low-level sadism for child-man viewers.
This state of affairs is newer than you might think. Apart from sports
programming and The Simpsons, which came along in the early 1990s,
there wasn't a lot to make young men pick up the remote. Most prime-time
television appealed to women and families, whose sensibilities were as
alien to dudes as finger bowls.
-
- Today, the child-man can find entire networks devoted
to his interests: Spike TV runs wrestling matches, Star Trek reruns,
and the high-tech detective drama CSI; Blackbelt TV broadcasts martial
arts around the clock; sci-fi is everywhere. Several years ago, the Cartoon
Network spied the potential in the child-man market, too, and introduced
Adult Swim, late-night programming with "adult" cartoons like Family
Guy and Futurama, a cult favorite co-created by Matt Groening
of The Simpsons fame. Adult Swim has cut into the male Letterman
and Leno audience, luring gold-plated advertisers Saab, Apple, and Taco
Bell; child-men, it should come as no surprise, eat lots of fast food.
-
- One can also lay the success of cable giant Comedy Central
at the child-man's sneakered foot. In its early-nineties infancy, Comedy
Central had old movie comedies, some stand-up acts, and few viewers. The
next several years brought some buzz with shows like Politically Incorrect.
But it was in 1997--the same year that Maxim arrived in America--that
the network struck gold with a cartoon series starring a group of foul-mouthed
eight-year-old boys. With its cutting subversion of all that's sacred and
polite,South Park was like a dog whistle that only SYMs could hear;
the show became the highest-rated cable series in that age group.
-
- In 1999, the network followed up with The Man Show,
famous for its "Juggies" (half-naked women with exceptionally
large, well, juggies), interviews with porn stars, drinking songs, and
a jingle that advised, "Quit your job and light a fart / Yank your
favorite private part." It was "like Maxim for TV,"
one network executive told Media Life. Comedy Central's viewers, almost
two-thirds of them male, have made both The Daily Show and The
Colbert Report cultural touchstones and launched the careers of stars
like Bill Maher, Jimmy Kimmel, Dave Chapelle, and, most notably, Daily
Show anchor Jon Stewart--who has already hosted the Academy Awards
and is set to do so again, a perfect symbol of the mainstreaming of the
SYM sensibility.
-
- Nothing attests more to the SYM's growing economic and
cultural might than video games do. Once upon a time, video games were
for little boys and girls--well, mostly little boys--who loved their Nintendos
so much, the lament went, that they no longer played ball outside. Those
boys have grown up to become child-man gamers, turning a niche industry
into a $12 billion powerhouse. Men between the ages of 18 and 34 are now
the biggest gamers; according to Nielsen Media, almost half--48.2 percent--of
American males in that age bracket had used a console during the last quarter
of 2006, and did so, on average, two hours and 43 minutes per day.
(That's 13 minutes longer than 12- to 17-year-olds, who evidently have
more responsibilities than today's twentysomethings.) Gaming--online games,
as well as news and information about games--often registers as the top
category in monthly surveys of Internet usage.
-
- And the child-man's home sweet media home is the Internet,
where no meddling censors or nervous advertisers deflect his desires. Some
sites, like MensNewsDaily.com, are edgy news providers. Others, like AskMen.com,
which claims 5 million visitors a month, post articles like "How to
Score a Green Chick" in the best spirit of Maxim-style self-parody.
"How is an SUV-driving, to-go-cup-using, walking environmental catastrophe
like yourself supposed to hook up with them?" the article asks. Answer:
Go to environmental meetings, yoga, or progressive bookstores ("but
watch out for lesbians").
-
- Other sites, like MenAreBetterThanWomen.com, TuckerMax.com,
TheBestPageInTheUniverse.com, and DrunkasaurusRex.com, walk Maxim's
goofiness and good-natured woman-teasing over the line into nastiness.
The men hanging out on these sites take pride in being "badasses"
and view the other half bitterly. A misogynist is a "man who hates
women as much as women hate each other," writes one poster at MenAreBetterThanWomen.
Another rails about "classic woman 'trap' questions-- Does this make
me look fat? Which one of my friends would you sleep with if you had to?
Do you really enjoy strip clubs?" The Fifth Amendment was created
because its architects' wives "drove them ape-shit asking questions
that they'd be better off simply refusing to answer."
-
- That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women
get a kick out of child-men and their frat/fart jokes; about 20 percent
of Maxim readers are female, for instance, and presumably not
all are doing research for the dating scene. But for many of the fairer
sex, the child-man is either an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak.
In Internet chat rooms, in advice columns, at female water-cooler confabs,
and in the pages of chick lit, the words "immature" and "men"
seem united in perpetuity. Women complain about the "Peter Pan syndrome"--the
phrase has been around since the early 1980s but it is resurgent--the "Mr.
Not Readys," and the "Mr. Maybes." Sex and the City chronicled
the frustrations of four thirtysomething women with immature, loutish,
and uncommitted men for six popular seasons.
-
- Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature
come to be? The most prevalent theory comes from feminist-influenced academics
and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity
crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue,
and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles. The hyper-masculinity
of Maxim et al. doesn't reflect any genuine male proclivities;
rather, retrograde media "construct" it.
-
- The fact that guys cheer on female heroines like Buffy
the Vampire Slayer as much as they do Chuck Norris tells against this theory
somewhat. But there's an ounce of truth to it. The men of the new media
are in backlash mode, largely because they believe that feminists have
stood in their way as media gatekeepers--that is, agents, editors, producers,
and the like--who don't understand or accept "men acting like men."
They gleefully stick their thumbs in the eyes of politically correct tsk-tskers.
In oneSouth Park episode, the Sexual Harassment Panda, a mascot who
teaches schoolkids the evils of sexual harassment, is fired after his little
talks provoke a flood of inane lawsuits. In Maxim, readers can find
articles like "How to Cure a Feminist," one of whose recommendations
is to "pretend you share her beliefs" by asking questions like,
"Has Gloria Steinem's marriage hurt the feminist agenda?"
-
- Insofar as the new guy media reflect a backlash against
feminism, they're part of the much larger story of men's long, uneasy relationship
with bourgeois order. The SYM with a taste for Maxim or South
Park may not like Gloria Steinem, but neither does he care for anyone
who tells him to behave--teachers, nutritionists, prohibitionists, vegetarians,
librarians, church ladies, counselors, and moralists of all stripes. In
fact, men have always sought out an antisocial, even anarchic, edge in
their popular culture. In a renowned essay, the critic Barbara Ehrenreich
argued that the arrival of Playboy in 1953 represented the beginning
of a male rebellion against the conformity of mid-century family life and
of middle-class virtues like duty and self-discipline. "All woman
wants is security," she quotes an early Playboy article
complaining. "And she is perfectly willing to crush man's adventurous
freedom-loving spirit to get it." Even the name of the ! magazine,
Ehrenreich observed, "defied the convention of hard-won maturity."
-
- Ehrenreich was right about the seditious impulse behind Playboy,
but wrong about its novelty. Male resistance to bourgeois domesticity had
been going on since the bourgeoisie went domestic. In A Man's Place,
historian John Tosh locates the rebellion's roots in the early nineteenth
century, when middle-class expectations for men began to shift away from
the patriarchal aloofness of the bad old days. Under the newer bourgeois
regime, the home was to be a haven in a heartless world, in which affection
and intimacy were guiding virtues. But in Tosh's telling, it didn't take
long before men vented frustrations with bourgeois domestication: they
went looking for excitement and male camaraderie in empire building, in
adventure novels by authors like Robert Louis Stevenson, and in going to
"the club."
-
- By the early twentieth century, the emerging mass market
in the U.S. offered new outlets for the virile urges that sat awkwardly
in the bourgeois parlor; hence titles likeField and Stream and Man's
Adventure, as well as steamier fare like Escapade and Caper.
When television sets came on the market in the late 1940s, it was the airing
of heavyweight fights and football games that led Dad to make the big purchase;
to this day, sports events--the battlefield made civilized--glue him to
the Barcalounger when he should be folding the laundry.
-
- But this history suggests an uncomfortable fact about
the new SYM: he's immature because he can be. We can argue endlessly about
whether "masculinity" is natural or constructed--whether men
are innately promiscuous, restless, and slobby, or socialized to be that
way--but there's no denying the lesson of today's media marketplace: give
young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria's
Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the
other, and it's the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile. For
whatever reason, adolescence appears to be the young man's default state,
proving what anthropologists have discovered in cultures everywhere: it
is marriage and children that turn boys into men. Now that the SYM can
put off family into the hazily distant future, he can--and will--try to
stay a child-man. Yesterday's paterfamilias or Levittown dad may have sought
to escape the duties of manhood through fantasies of adventures a! t sea,
pinups, or sublimated war on the football field, but there was considerable
social pressure for him to be a mensch. Not only is no one asking that
today's twenty- or thirtysomething become a responsible husband and father--that
is, grow up--but a freewheeling marketplace gives him everything that he
needs to settle down in pig's heaven indefinitely.
-
- And that heaven can get pretty piggish. Take Tucker Max,
whose eponymous website is a great favorite among his peers. In a previous
age, Max would have been what was known as a "catch." Good-looking,
ambitious, he graduated from the University of Chicago and Duke Law. But
in a universe where child-men can thrive, he has found it more to his liking--and
remarkably easy--to pursue a different career path: professional "asshole."
Max writes what he claims are "true stories about my nights out acting
like an average twentysomething"--binge drinking (UrbanDictionary.com
lists Tucker Max Drunk, or TMD, as a synonym for "falling down drunk"),
fighting, leaving vomit and fecal detritus for others to clean up, and,
above all, hooking up with "random" girls galore--sorority sisters,
Vegas waitresses, Dallas lap dancers, and Junior Leaguers who're into erotic
asphyxiation.
-
- Throughout his adventures, Max--like a toddler stuck
somewhere around the oedipal stage--remains fixated on his penis and his
"dumps." He is utterly without conscience--"Female insecurity:
it's the gift that keeps on giving," he writes about his efforts to
undermine his prey's self-esteem in order to seduce them more easily. Think
of Max as the final spawn of an aging and chromosomally challenged Hugh
Hefner, and his website and best-selling book, I Hope They Serve Beer
in Hell, as evidence of a male culture in profound decline. Playboy's
aspirations toward refinement still hinted at the call of the ego and a
culture with limits on male restiveness; Max, the child-man who answers
to no one except his fellow "assholes," is all id--and proud
of it.
-
- Now, you could argue that the motley crew of Maxim,
Comedy Central, Halo 3, and even the noxious Tucker Max aren't much
to worry about, and that extended adolescence is what the word implies:
a temporary stage. Most guys have lots of other things going on, and even
those who spend too much time on TuckerMax.com will eventually settle down.
Men know the difference between entertainment and real life. At any rate,
like gravity, growing up happens; nature has rules.
-
- That's certainly a hope driving the sharpest of recent
child-man entertainments, Judd Apatow's hit movie Knocked Up. What
sets Knocked Up apart from, say, Old School, is that it
invites the audience to enjoy the SYM's immaturity--his T-and-A obsessions,
his slobby indolence--even while insisting on its feebleness. The potheaded
23-year-old Ben Stone accidentally impregnates Alison, a gorgeous stranger
he was lucky enough to score at a bar. He is clueless about what to do
when she decides to have the baby, not because he's a "badass"--actually,
he has a big heart--but because he dwells among social retards. His roommates
spend their time squabbling about who farted on whose pillow and when to
launch their porn website. His father is useless, too: "I've been
divorced three times," he tells Ben when his son asks for advice about
his predicament. "Why are you asking me?" In the end, though,
Ben understands that he needs to grow up. He gets a job and an ap! artment,
and learns to love Alison and the baby. This is a comedy, after all.
-
- It is also a fairy tale for guys. You wouldn't know how
to become an adult even if you wanted to? Maybe a beautiful princess will
come along and show you. But the important question that Apatow's comedy
deals with only obliquely is what extended living as a child-man does to
a guy--and to the women he collides with along the way.
-
- For the problem with child-men is that they're not very
promising husbands and fathers. They suffer from a proverbial "fear
of commitment," another way of saying that they can't stand to think
of themselves as permanently attached to one woman. Sure, they have girlfriends;
many are even willing to move in with them. But cohabiting can be just
another Peter Pan delaying tactic. Women tend to see cohabiting as a potential
path to marriage; men view it as another place to hang out or, as Barbara
Dafoe Whitehead observes in Why There Are No Good Men Left, a way
to "get the benefits of a wife without shouldering the reciprocal
obligations of a husband."
-
- Even men who do marry don't easily overcome child-manhood.
Neal Pollack speaks for some of them in his 2007 memoir Alternadad.
Pollack struggles with how to stay "hip"--smoking pot and going
to rock concerts--once he becomes a father to Elijah, "the new roommate,"
as he calls him. Pollack makes peace with fatherhood because he finds that
he can introduce his toddler to the best alternative bands, and also because
he has so many opportunities to exercise the child-man's fascination with
"poop." He is affectingly mad for his little boy. Yet his efforts
to turn his son into a hip little Neal Pollack--"My son and I were
moshing! Awesome!"--reflect the self-involvement of the child-man
who resists others' claims on him.
-
- Knocked Up evokes a more destructive self-involvement
in a subplot involving Alison's miserably married sister Debbie and her
husband, Pete, the father of her two little girls. Pete, who frequently
disappears to play fantasy baseball, get high in Las Vegas, or just go
to the movies on his own, chronically wields irony to distance himself
from his family. "Care more!" his wife yells at him. "You're
cool because you don't give a shit."
-
- And that "coolness" points to what may be the
deepest existential problem with the child-man--a tendency to avoid not
just marriage but any deep attachments. This is British writer Nick Hornby's
central insight in his novel About a Boy. The book's antihero, Will,
is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of responsibility. He has
no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact that the author symbolizes
by having the jobless 36-year-old live off the residuals of a popular Christmas
song written by his late father. Hornby shows how the media-saturated limbo
of contemporary guyhood makes it easy to fill your days without actually
doing anything. "Sixty years ago, all the things Will relied on to
get him through the day simply didn't exist," Hornby writes. "There
was no daytime TV, there were no videos, there were no glossy magazines.
. . . Now, though, it was easy [to do nothing]. There was almost too much
to do."
-
- Will's unemployment is part of a more general passionlessness.
To pick up women, for instance, he pretends to have a son and joins a single-parent
organization; the plight of the single mothers means nothing to him. For
Will, women are simply fleshy devices that dispense sex, and sex is just
another form of entertainment, a "fantastic carnal alternative to
drink, drugs, and a great night out, but nothing much more than that."
-
- As the title of his 2005 novel Indecision suggests,
Benjamin Kunkel also shows how apathy infects the new SYM world. His hero,
28-year-old Dwight Wilmerding, suffers from "abulia"--chronic
indecisiveness--so severe that he finds himself paralyzed by the Thanksgiving
choices of turkey, cranberry sauce, and dressing. His parents are divorced,
his most recent girlfriend has faded away, and he has lost his job. Like
Will, Dwight is a quintessential slacker, unable to commit and unwilling
to feel. The only woman he has loved is his sister, who explains the attraction:
"I'm the one girl you actually got to know in the right way. It was
gradual, it was inevitable." Like Hornby, Kunkel sees the easy availability
of sex as a source of slacker apathy. In a world of serial relationships,
SYMs "fail to sublimate their libidinal energies in the way that actually
makes men attractive," Kunkel told a dismayed female interviewer in Salon.
With no one to challenge them to de! eper connections, they swim across
life's surfaces.
-
- The superficiality, indolence, and passionlessness evoked
in Hornby's and Kunkel's novels haven't triggered any kind of cultural
transformation. Kunkel's book briefly made a few regional bestseller lists,
and Hornby sells well enough. But sales of "lad lit," as some
call books with SYM heroes, can't hold a candle to those of its chick-lit
counterpart. The SYM doesn't read much, remember, and he certainly doesn't
read anything prescribing personal transformation. The child-man may be
into self-mockery; self-reflection is something else entirely.
-
- That's too bad. Men are "more unfinished as people,"
Kunkel has neatly observed. Young men especially need a culture that can
help them define worthy aspirations. Adults don't emerge. They're made.
-
- Kay S. Hymowitz is a contributing editor of City
Journal and the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
Her latest book is Marriage and Caste in America.
-
- http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_single_young_men.html
|
