Young men are lazy and unambitious.
Yeah... but the feedback loop is the catch. And women hold the key.
Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved
most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial
independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang
out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal
adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This "pre-adulthood" has much
to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to
state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It
doesn't bring out the best in men.
"We are sick
of hooking up with guys," writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a
touchingly funny 2010 book, "I Don't Care About Your Band: What I
Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons,
Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated." What Ms. Klausner
means by "guys" is males who are not boys or men but something in
between. "Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for
people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around
the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college
friends.... They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who
drove us home." One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner's book wrote, "I had
to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this
same guy?"
For most of us, the cultural habitat
of pre-adulthood no longer seems noteworthy. After all, popular culture
has been crowded with pre-adults for almost two decades. Hollywood
started the affair in the early 1990s with movies like "Singles,"
"Reality Bites," "Single White Female" and "Swingers." Television soon
deepened the relationship, giving us the agreeable company of Monica,
Joey, Rachel and Ross; Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer; Carrie,
Miranda, et al.
But for all its familiarity,
pre-adulthood represents a momentous sociological development. It's no
exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and
women living independently, while also having enough disposable income
to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in
human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people
have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and
bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for
more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were
always relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They
are a major demographic event.
What also makes pre-adulthood something new is its radical reversal
of the sexual hierarchy. Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They
graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to
34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and
they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more
confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s,
when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making
strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even
out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.
WHY GROW UP? Men in their 20s
now have an array of toys and distractions at their disposal, from
videogames and sports bars to 'lad' magazines like Maxim, which makes
Playboy look like Camus.
Still,
for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men
gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit
geeks or grubby slackers—a gender gap neatly crystallized by the
director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie "Knocked Up." The story's
hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with
Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a
Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their
days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to
launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a
television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what
appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby,
she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble
his way toward being a responsible grownup.
So where did these pre-adults come from? You
might assume that their appearance is a result of spoiled 24-year-olds
trying to prolong the campus drinking and hook-up scene while exploiting
the largesse of mom and dad. But the causes run deeper than that.
Beginning in the 1980s, the economic advantage of higher education—the
"college premium"—began to increase dramatically. Between 1960 and 2000,
the percentage of younger adults enrolled in college or graduate school
more than doubled. In the "knowledge economy," good jobs go to those
with degrees. And degrees take years.
Another factor
in the lengthening of the road to adulthood is our increasingly
labyrinthine labor market. The past decades' economic expansion and the
digital revolution have transformed the high-end labor market into a
fierce competition for the most stimulating, creative and glamorous
jobs. Fields that attract ambitious young men and women often require
years of moving between school and internships, between internships and
jobs, laterally and horizontally between jobs, and between cities in the
U.S. and abroad. The knowledge economy gives the educated young an
unprecedented opportunity to think about work in personal terms. They
are looking not just for jobs but for "careers," work in which they can
exercise their talents and express their deepest passions. They expect
their careers to give shape to their identity. For today's pre-adults,
"what you do" is almost synonymous with "who you are," and starting a
family is seldom part of the picture.
Pre-adulthood can be compared to adolescence, an idea invented in the
mid-20th century as American teenagers were herded away from the fields
and the workplace and into that new institution, the high school. For a
long time, the poor and recent immigrants were not part of adolescent
life; they went straight to work, since their families couldn't afford
the lost labor and income. But the country had grown rich enough to
carve out space and time to create a more highly educated citizenry and
work force. Teenagers quickly became a marketing and cultural
phenomenon. They also earned their own psychological profile. One of the
most influential of the psychologists of adolescence was Erik Erikson,
who described the stage as a "moratorium," a limbo between childhood and
adulthood characterized by role confusion, emotional turmoil and
identity conflict.
Like adolescents in the 20th century,
today's pre-adults have been wait-listed for adulthood. Marketers and
culture creators help to promote pre-adulthood as a lifestyle. And like
adolescence, pre-adulthood is a class-based social phenomenon, reserved
for the relatively well-to-do. Those who don't get a four-year college
degree are not in a position to compete for the more satisfying jobs of
the knowledge economy.
But
pre-adults differ in one major respect from adolescents. They write
their own biographies, and they do it from scratch. Sociologists use the
term "life script" to describe a particular society's ordering of
life's large events and stages. Though such scripts vary across
cultures, the archetypal plot is deeply rooted in our biological nature.
The invention of adolescence did not change the large Roman numerals of
the American script. Adults continued to be those who took over the
primary tasks of the economy and culture. For women, the central task
usually involved the day-to-day rearing of the next generation; for men,
it involved protecting and providing for their wives and children. If
you followed the script, you became an adult, a temporary custodian of
the social order until your own old age and demise.
Tony Manero (John Travolta) has
an unfulfilling job at a hardware store. He really lives for weekend
nights ("Watch the hair!") at the disco.
Unlike
adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come
next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be
skipped altogether. In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had
never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age
group. In the U.S., the mean age at first marriage has been climbing
toward 30 (a point past which it has already gone in much of Europe). It
is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a
"quarter-life crisis," a period of depression and worry over their
future.
Given the rigors of contemporary
career-building, pre-adults who do marry and start families do so later
than ever before in human history. Husbands, wives and children are a
drag on the footloose life required for the early career track and
identity search. Pre-adulthood has also confounded the primordial search
for a mate. It has delayed a stable sense of identity, dramatically
expanded the pool of possible spouses, mystified courtship routines and
helped to throw into doubt the very meaning of marriage. In 1970, to
cite just one of many numbers proving the point, nearly seven in 10
25-year-olds were married; by 2000, only one-third had reached that
milestone.
American men have been struggling with
finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th
century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the
domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away
from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement
either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as
they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They
turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At
midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to
buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks
began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of
Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male
domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title
alone.
In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for
today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled
pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the
1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular "lad" magazine arrived
from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely
undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.
At the same time, young men were
tuning in to cable channels like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network and
Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its
targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors
like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will
Farrell and Seth Rogen, cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes,
breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy
pranks. Americans had always struck foreigners as youthful, even
childlike, in their energy and optimism. But this was too much.
What explains
this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural
uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal
rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical
maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate
courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal
was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today,
however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and
fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed
to play their roles—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are
obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
Today's pre-adult male is like an
actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to
compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or
self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but
not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers
and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
Single men have never been civilization's most responsible actors;
they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who
deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be
disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with "Star
Wars" posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable
estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised.
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained
by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young
man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a
while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a
husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the
troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only
serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they
grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.
They might as well just have another beer.
