Abstract
Adolescent male elephants run amok when there are no mature bulls in the herd to keep them in line. A similar problem has been said to afflict human societies. Without a firm male hand to guide them into clearly defined adult roles, lads become louts and boys remain guys long after they should have become men.
Robert Bly argued along these lines, invoking traditional cultures rather than elephants, in his book The Sibling Society (1997). If young men today are aimless, narcissistic, and unsure of their place in society, Bly said, it is because they are raising themselves, without benefit of adult male wisdom, in a culture rife with schlock and grift. Michael Kimmel’s Guyland (2008) echoes Bly’s theme, though Kimmel does not claim that the wisdom needed to rectify the situation is vested solely in men or to be found in ancient myths. Joining this genre of books on young men failing to grow up is Kay Hymowitz’s Manning Up.
In Hymowitz’s analysis, as in Kimmel’s, young men today experience a period of extended adolescence. Whereas once upon a time young men settled down earlier and embraced constructive adult roles as husbands, providers, and fathers, today they remain self-indulgent “preadults” into their late 20s or early 30s. Although the title of Hymowitz’s book refers to “men,” as if extended adolescence is a universal phenomenon, she is really writing about college-educated white males in the United States. This is much the same group that Kimmel writes about in Guyland.
For Kimmel, the problem with guyland is that it fosters sexist, selfish, destructive behavior. For the most part, Hymowitz agrees, though she is less concerned with young men’s sexism than with their immaturity. She wants young men to grow up sooner, don the mantle of sober manhood, and become reliable partners for young heterosexual women who want to raise children and have satisfying family lives. But what’s the source of the problem? Why don’t middle-class white boys morph into Ward Cleaver right out of college?
Hymowitz points to multiple causes. First, there is the economy. She says that the expansion of the knowledge sector has created many new job possibilities, and so young people today need more time to figure out what they want to do. This kind of economic change, she says, has affected both sexes, and it is not necessarily a bad thing if young people take longer to find jobs that are right for them.
Why, then, are young men doing especially badly? Because, Hymowitz argues, birth control and feminism have allowed young women to outcompete them. By delaying child-bearing, taking education more seriously, and pursuing their career ambitions more aggressively, women have gotten a leg up on men. While twenty- and thirty-something guys are indulging themselves in an Animal House existence, young women are establishing themselves as competent professionals, making it even tougher for their feckless male age-peers to get good jobs and settle down.
Hymowitz also sees the problem as rooted in culture. Consumerism and pop culture promote narcissism and self-indulgence all around, and this is no boon to anyone’s maturity. But the more serious causes of extended male adolescence, Hymowitz alleges, are “loss of the almost universal male life script—manhood defined by marriage and fatherhood” (p. 136) and the “widespread cultural attack on older forms of manhood.” Young men thus come of age without understanding what it means to be a man and what is expected of them as men. Hymowitz here sounds like a mash-up of Robert Bly and Harvey Mansfield.
If the only consequence was that young men act like irresponsible frat boys longer than they should, this would be bad enough. But for Hymowitz the bad consequences extend to disruption of the two-parent, married, heterosexual family with children—the kind that most young people still say they want and the kind that, as Hymowitz sees it, best serves the common good. The disruption occurs because young women—emboldened and successful—cannot find equally competent, mature, and reliable male marriage partners, and so, with their biological clocks ticking, they decide to go it alone and become single parents, an arrangement, Hymowitz says, that does not produce the best outcomes for children or society.
If Hymowitz’s book sounds like the neoconservative version of Guyland, well, that is probably what one ought to expect from a writer employed by the Manhattan Institute. On the other hand, Hymowitz critiques selfish individualism, excoriates Tucker Max and his sexist ilk, and does not think young women should give up the benefits won by liberal feminists. It also seems clear that the gender script she would like young men to embrace is one that includes knowing how to deal with women as equals. So there is some distance between Hymowitz and the far-right, turn-back-the-clock crowd.
Sociologists are unlikely, however, to give much credence to Hymowitz’s claim that “girls rule” because they are now the numerical majority in college and because there is little or no wage gap between men and women at early career stages. Yes, young men still dominate in high-tech and finance, and, yes, wage gaps emerge later in life but, according to Hymowitz, this is mainly because of women’s choices. Sexism as a force that channels women into lower-paying fields, and which affects pay levels in those fields, does not register on Hymowitz’s analytic radar.
Hymowitz also seems to confuse pop culture images of powerful women with women having power in the real world. She invokes Xena, Buffy, and the Powerpuff Girls as if they were Census data. The fact of men’s continuing near monopoly on institutional power at the highest levels of the economy, government, and the military does not keep Hymowitz from proclaiming, with journalistic cutesiness, that today we live in a “New Girl Order.” Actually, no. Some of the young males may be adrift, but the old bulls are still in charge.