Opinion

MEN WILL BE BOYS

Today’s young men are coming of age in an era with no road maps, no blueprints, and no primers to tell them what a man is or how to become one. None of the terms given to this stage of development – “emergent adulthood,” “twixters” – have any resonance whatever with the young men I have spoken to on college campuses and in workplaces around the country.

Almost all of them call themselves – and call each other – “guys.” It’s a generic catch-all term that demarcates this age group, setting it apart from “kids” and “grown-ups.”

Guyland is the world in which these young men live. It is both a stage of life, an undefined time span between adolescence and adulthood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other nuisances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mindset, young men shirk the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated on the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men despite all evidence to the contrary.

Males between 16 and 26 number well over 22 million – more than 15% of the total male population in the United States. The “guy” age bracket represents the front end of the single most desirable consumer market, according to advertisers. Yet aside from assiduous market research, Guyland is a terra incognita. Many of us only know we’ve landed there when we feel distraught about our children, anxious that they have entered, or will be entering, a world that we barely know. Just what are they doing in their rooms at all hours of the night? Why are they so directionless when they graduate that they take dead end jobs and move back home? What happened to the motivated young man who left for college with such high hopes and a keen sense of purpose? And guys themselves often wonder where they left their dreams.

WHO ARE THESE GUYS?

It’s easy to observe these “guys” virtually everywhere in America – in every high school and college campus in America, with their baseball caps on frontways or backwards, their easy smiles or anxious darting eyes, huddled around tiny electronic gadgets or laptops, or relaxing in front of massive wide screen hi-def TVs, in basements, dorms, and frat houses.

In some respects, Guyland can be defined by what guys do for fun. It’s the “boyhood” side of the continuum they’re so reluctant to leave. It’s drinking, sex, and video games. It’s watching sports, reading about sports, listening to sports on the radio. It’s television – cartoons, reality shows, music videos, shoot-’em-up movies, sports, and porn – pizza and beer. It’s all the behavior that makes the real grown-ups in their lives roll their eyes and wonder, “When will he grow up?!”

The US census shows a steady and dramatic decline in the percentage of young adults who have completed the demographic markers of marriage and becoming a parent. In 2000, 46% of women and 31% of men had reached those markers by age 30. In 1960, just forty years earlier, 77% of women and 65% of men had reached them.

There are some parts of Guyland that are quite positive. The advancing age of marriage, for example, benefits both women and men, who have more time to explore career opportunities, not to mention establishing their identities, before committing to home and family. And much of what qualifies as fun in Guyland is relatively harmless.

Yet there is a disturbing undercurrent to much of it as well. College guys post pornography everywhere in their dorm rooms. In fraternities and dorms on virtually every campus, plenty of guys are getting drunk almost every night, prowling for women with whom they can “hook up,” and chalking it all up to harmless fun. Homophobia is ubiquitous; indeed, “that’s so gay” is probably the most frequently used put down in middle schools, high schools and college today.

WHY IS THIS HAPPENING NOW?

The entire landscape of Guyland is structured by the massive social and economic changes in the United States over the past several decades. As Susan Faludi documented in her book “Stiffed,” men who once found meaning and social value in their work are increasingly pushed into lower-wage service occupations; as the economy has shifted from a culture of production to a culture of consumption men experience their masculinity less as providers and protectors, and more as consumers, as “ornaments.” Many men feel “downsized” – both economically and emotionally; they feel smaller, less essential, less like real men.

At the same time, women have entered every single arena once completely dominated by men. Where once there were so many places where men could validate their masculinity, proving it in the eyes of other men, there are today fewer and fewer places where they aren’t also competing with women.

Yes, young men have always wanted to prove themselves – that is nothing new. But today that desire has a distinct tone of desperation to it.

WHAT CAN BE DONE?

Just as one can support the troops but oppose the war, so too can one appreciate and support individual guys while engaging critically with the social and cultural world they inhabit. We need to enter this world, see the perilous field in which boys become men in our society because we desperately need to start a conversation about that world. We do boys a great disservice by turning away, excusing the excesses of Guyland as just “boys being boys” – because we fail to see just how powerful its influence really is. Only when we begin to engage in these conversations, with open eyes and open hearts – as parents to children, as friends, as guys themselves – can we both reduce the risks and enable guys to navigate it more successfully.

The time has come to map and acknowledge this terrain in order to enable guys – and those who know them, care about them, love them – to steer a course with greater integrity and honesty, so they can be true not to some artificial world, but to themselves.

Reprinted from “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men,” by Michael Kimmel (HarperCollins) Copyright(c) 2008.