You can spot them in any pub or bar: twenty and thirtysomething men who are enjoying self-indulgent lives free from the responsibilities that their fathers and grandfathers shouldered at their age. Finished with college or university, they have decent but not particularly well-paid jobs, with no obvious career paths. They live with other single guys, are glued to gadgets and video games and, while they meet plenty of girls, and often sleep with them, they are in no rush to settle down with a wife and mortgage.
This portrait of young middle-class males, presented by the author Kay Hymowitz in her book Manning Up: How The Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, infuriated many young men when it was published recently in America, and is likely to do the same when it is published in the UK this month. Despite the uproar, Hymowitz stands by her theory: that many Single Young Men (SYM) have been emasculated by the growing equality of women in society and that women themselves are paying a price because modern men are taking longer to grow up.
At her home in Brooklyn, New York, a sprawling brownstone where she lives with her husband of 40 years and where they brought up three children, Hymowitz laughs at the reaction to her book. An excerpt entitled Where Have the Good Men Gone? was one of the most commented on in The Wall Street Journal’s history.
Hymowitz is not surprised. She first wrote about the average twentysomething man lingering in a “cultural archipelago of crudity and irresponsibility” several years ago, and got such immediate feedback that she says she knew she was on to something. “There are lots of angry young men out there,” she says. “They’re not just angry at me for seeming to put them down. They’re angry at women in general and at today’s culture, which is making them feel insignificant.”
She says that her book grew out of an observation that relations between the sexes during pre-adulthood, a period roughly defined as being in the 18-34 age range, are, at best, confused. “Young women today complain about men being thoughtless and immature and coarse, and I wanted to know how this perverse creature — this Animal House frat boy — came to be,” she says. When she asked men, she got a deluge of resentful reactions from SYM saying that they had given up trying to second-guess what women want. She quotes one e-mail: “It’s a hell of a lot more fun spending time with my friends than being with a woman who thinks everything I enjoy is stupid.”
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This conflict has been decades in the making, according to Hymowitz, who says that economic and educational changes are at the root of the cultural shift. “For the first time, young women are reaching their twenties with more education, more property and, arguably, more ambition than their male counterparts. They’ve been groomed by their parents and by their teachers to be successful, they’ve adapted to this female-friendly economy and they find lots of opportunities to express their talents and their ambitions.”
Young men in the same age group, she argues, take longer to establish their careers. They have less confidence and less drive than women of the same age and are, therefore, more likely to under-achieve. Pre-adulthood, she says, does not bring out the best in men. “The child-man,” Hymowitz says in her book, “is the mirror image of the alpha girl. If she is ambitious, he is a slacker. If she is hyper-organised and self-directed, he tends toward passivity and vagueness. If she is preternaturally mature, he is happily immature.” The child-man, she adds, is typified by stars such as Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill, who capture the confusion and uncertainties of many young men.
The author says that many SYM are getting mixed messages on the dating scene. “Men talked about how women claim to want nice guys, and how they had been raised to treat women with respect, and then they found out that women were actually not so attracted to the nice guys and preferred the Charlie Sheens of this world. There was a lot of anger about that.”
Another important way that young and single men are getting mixed messages is fatherhood. “We are always saying how important fathers are,” Hymowitz says. “But we’re watching the breakdown of family life and men are getting the message that they’re not necessary. Most middle-class women want to marry and have children, and would like to have a guy around, but they can go it alone.
“I think most young men would say it’s not an issue, but I don’t think they understand how this affects their approach to dating and mating. Men [used to] grow up knowing they had this responsibility and it not only organised their development, it made them more serious about their lives.”
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Hymowitz’s book has attracted considerable criticism. Many young men have rubbished her theories, defending their gender and questioning the author’s definition of adulthood. They say that a man’s maturity should not be measured by the fact that he has not yet married or become a father. Young people of both sexes point out that in today’s recessionary world there are sound economic reasons for postponing adulthood. Hymowitz, a prolific social commentator and a Manhattan Institute scholar, has been criticised for not providing enough data and basing most of her theories on anecdotal evidence.
She says that there is no explicit data for the “limbo” she has identified, but points out that the average age of marriage for men is 28 and is even higher among college-educated males. Although she has been accused of blaming men, she says that the opposite is true and that she feels great sympathy for today’s twentysomething men. “There used to be a clear script for young men to follow and I think for men who don’t have terrific social intuition, they really don’t know what to do. It’s sad.”
She says that society is putting terrific burdens on young males. “As boys and girls have grown up to be equals, they take for granted that they can have friendships with the opposite sex, for instance. That’s a lovely thing. However, some men say they find these relationships difficult, they know that they are not supposed to feel attracted to the women but they do feel something. I think guys have a harder time draining the relationship of sex than girls” Hymowitz says that she heard recently of an American college that was planning to have co-ed dorms. “I think that’s a terrible thing to do to young men, to say that they are going to sleep in the same room as young women but they are not supposed to want to have sex. I hope they [the college] don’t go through with it. These kinds of ideas are emasculating to men.”
Hymowitz thinks that young adults, male and female, face a new predicament. “I think both sides have to understand a little bit more about what is unique at this stage in their lives, not just compared to their parents but to all previous cultures. They need to understand that men and women are confused about what is expected of them. I think feminism has done a lot of great things for women but now we have to tone down the ‘I don’t need a man’ attitude and men have to tone down the anger and demonstrate a bit more confidence in the fact that they are needed. We are an interdependent species. It’s always been that way and it should be that way.”