Manning Up, Basic Books, 2011, $25.99
The Atlantic Monthly, November 2011, $5.99 (Print)
Pity the poor single guy
who is just looking to have a beer these days, with no plan for the
future, and no desire to get married. He is derided as a preadult, a
slacker, a failure in the globalized economy, and a second-rate
student. Men are taking it on the chin (metaphorically-speaking, in
actuality, in print) from women frustrated with their dumb,
inveterate dudeness. Guys, in the opinion of many angry women, can
do nothing right, are immature oafs to boot, and don't deserve decent
women, or even any kind of women, for that matter.
Yes, these may sound
just like the complaints made by every female since Eve and her
Significant Other were tossed out of the Garden of Eden. There is an
interesting wrinkle now, however. Today's complainers are
confronting the serious repercussions that failing men, bruised by
the Great Recession and an economy that no longer requires much
brawn, will have on women, themselves struggling to get on with their
lives. Kate Bolick is the current standard bearer of this sisterhood
of doubt. An attractive thirty-nine-year-old - and yes, that matters
- Bolick's face graces the cover of the November 2011 issue of
The
Atlantic Monthly, a lone tear descending her
right cheek. Her article,
All the Single Ladies, is half-sober exposition of the problems facing
aging, marriage-minded, baby-desiring women, half-cry from the heart
for the ex-boyfriend that she broke up with ten years ago for,
apparently, not-so-good reasons.
Bolick herself contends
with the unhappy truth of single women everywhere – time is not a
friend. She is smart, successful, and lovely. She is also missing a
ring, and getting older. The decline of men, she writes, will mean
less marriage overall, and ultimately more single-mother households.
Bolick's is a bleak piece. She has no encouraging message for other
women, just an acknowledgment that in the absence of what she deems
to be worthwhile men, she (and they) will probably have to come to
terms with remaining unmarried.
The subtext of the
article - why Bolick's looks and age matter - is that she is
so pretty, and still hasn't managed to find a husband. It is
difficult to imagine any younger, single, marriage-minded woman
reading the piece without experiencing at least a frisson of fear.
Do you mean that I
could look like that
and still wind up
a spinster? No doubt this was the
intent of running the article paired with the cover featuring the
fetching but teary Bolick. The point was driven home when Bolick
described her meeting with a group of college women, disappointed
with the dating scene, who nonetheless all hoped to be married by the
time they were either twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Bolick asked
them how they would feel if they found themselves at her age without
a husband. “I don't think I can bear doing this for that long!”
one said in dismay.
Men are also letting
women down by not becoming, well, men. Kay S. Hymowitz, a fellow at
the Manhattan Institute, is the author of
Manning Up:How the Rise ofWomen Has Turned Men Into Boys. The feelings of unhappy women
toward their not-quite-grown-up “guys” are summed up in her quote
of comedienne Julie Klausner. “They are more like the kids we
babysat than the dads who drove us home.”
Ouch!
Hymowitz describes a new
period of life, for both men and women, which she calls
“preadulthood.” It comes between adolescence and true adulthood,
lasting from the twenties to the early thirties. Both genders
transition through this, but men, it seems, revel in it far more, and
prove more reluctant to leave it behind.
I am not sure how novel
the concept of preadulthood is, especially with regard to men. There
have always been some who have staved off the onset of adult
responsibility. A few have managed to do this for the better part of
forever. But most men eventually settled down, married, had
children, and took out a mortgage. What differs these days is the
impatience of high-achieving women stuck waiting for their child-man
boyfriends to finally grow up.
While Hymowitz is on
target in her emphasis on the importance of women's improving career
prospects partially explaining their own delay in marrying, I don't
agree that the rise of women has turned men into boys. Men need no
help there, and never have. Rather, what has happened is that women
themselves have enabled men to remain in a semi-adolescent
state because of their own educational and career triumphs. In a
bygone age, men worked and women married men who worked. Men almost
always had educational credentials equal or superior to those of
their wives. It went, almost without saying, that a man had a
better-paying job than his wife. The financial security that a man
could provide was always a good reason for a woman to marry, after
all.
Things have changed.
Women now enjoy educational opportunities equal to those of men, and
the resulting employment prospects that used to be the province of
only men just a generation ago. Understandably, women have taken
advantage of these and not looked back.
Left in their wake,
though, are many men their own age. Guys have just not kept up. But
it is incorrect to attribute men's educational failings to women's
achievements. I think that American males have undergone something
of an intellectual apocalypse over the last several decades. When I
think of the guys with whom I grew up, or went to college, I recall
far too many sports and videogame-obsessed heavy drinkers who would
not have read a book if their lives depended it. Too many guys just
don't have the habit of reading. They never acquired it. They have
no inclination to learn. Compare this to women, for whom many,
reading is not merely a hobby, but an integral part of their
emotional and intellectual lives. I have often seen a young woman
reading with the most intense interest. Guys – not so much.
If you are not a reader
then school will not have much of an appeal. It stands to reason
that, if men, broadly-speaking, don't read as much as women do, they
will not do as well in school, and their job prospects will suffer as
a result.
So today, many women are
confronted by the surprising and unfortunate situation in which they
have surpassed the majority of men educationally and economically,
but are themselves left with relatively few good marriage prospects
because of their achievements. Gaining advanced degrees is a long
and arduous process, and women have therefore not been pressing men
to marry as early as they once did. Women want to wait till their
schooling is finished and they are settled into their careers before
marching down the aisle. During these years they do not insist that
their guys grow up and get ahead. Not nearly hard enough, at least.
Marriage is not the highest priority of a young, twenty-something
woman today, and if is not one for her, it will likely not be one for
her boyfriend, either.
So what effect does this
have on guys? Well, an extended period of doing all sorts of fun
stuff that would not have been allowed if they had gotten married.
Today's guys are childless, all-too-often jobless because of the junk
economy, and typically unencumbered by attachments to anything but
their own pleasure and amusement. Should women be surprised that men
are taking advantage of the situation? They are very often their
enablers. Please tell me of the last time that a young woman dropped
her boyfriend because he was immature. Oh, I'm sure you can think of
one or two, but now count how many years she wasted on him. Far too
many, right?
This brings me back to
Kate Bolick. I feel for her plight. She is the kind of woman that
many a man would be proud to call his wife. But back in 2001, at the
age of twenty-eight, she dumped her best bet for a wedding, her
then-boyfriend Alan, because she says, “something was missing; I
was not ready to settle down.” She even says that these was “no
good reason to end things,” and describes Alan as “an exceptional
person, intelligent, good-looking, loyal, kind.”
Wow. Alan sounds like a
catch to me. Most men are not even two of those things. So can guys
be blamed for thinking that too many women, such as Bolick, have
unjustifiably high standards? What more could a woman realistically
ask for? Would it have made a difference if Alan had been rich? Or
was bulletproof, and could fly too?
The current situation
seems to benefit no one. Declining males obviously suffer, as do
women, who will never profit from floundering boy-men. Our society
could use a heavy dose of realistic thinking when comes to
relationships, in particular why so many people have a difficult time
remaining happily within one. Also, a frank appraisal of the
inability of many men to get their act together might have a salutary
effect on their school performance and their success in the job
market. Women themselves might improve their lot if they sought
marriage and children, or at least, children, sooner, rather than
later, before their fertility became problematic.
Do I expect such things
to happen? No, because avoiding such unhappy thoughts and tough
choices in favor of platitudes and empty wishing is much more in
keeping with the tenor of the times. For the foreseeable future,
women will have to make do with men as they are, Xbox and all.
Nevertheless, the lonely Kate Bolick may yet have the last laugh.
Word on the interwebs is that her story has been optioned for a
television series. Stay tuned.
Marc De Santis is a
writer in New York.
The World Championship Punkin Chunkin contest, held in Delaware, has six categories: centrifugal, catapult, tortion, trebuchet, human powered, and air cannon. Each team builds a giant device (resembling siege devices -- which are the template for many of the machines) to send their pumpkin flying as far as possible. Teams have three minutes to prepare their machine for the launch, then the pumpkin is sent flying! (Hopefully: Sometimes the pumpkins break apart -- called "pumpkin pie" -- and sometimes they roll off before launch.) Each team gets one shot a round, and there are three rounds. The teams' best time is counted, and whoever has the furthest distance in their category wins "the world's biggest trophy."
While using technology to hurl pumpkins through the sky isn't a... traditional sport, it is an impressive competition. The competitors both know how silly it is (team and device names include Second Amendment Too, Hormone Blaster (an all-female team), Chunk Norris, and Chucky III) and also put tremendous time and planning into their quest for victory. While the show is somewhat manipulative by only showing and giving background on certain competitors, there's also a sense of tension as the top three fight for the top spot: Sometimes the difference between first and second place is only 10 or 20 feet, and some times push their machines literally past the breaking point in a last-ditch attempt to come from behind. Punkin Chunkin is an odd and enjoyable celebration of American ingenuity, silliness, and competition.
Overall grade: B
While I didn't see this year's remake of Footloose, it's safe to say -- from the trailer, and the original -- that the theme of the movie is that teens just gotta dance. Considering that the remake is set in the south, it also follows that they just gotta dance to country music. This year's Footloose soundtrack delivers plenty of country music; but as for the dancing...
