The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (4 page)
Read The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Online
Authors: Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan
What does it mean to be a man? And where do guys get their information about what it means to be a manly? Many men we surveyed said they felt most like a man when they were honest about who they were, confidently made decisions and actively pursued their dreams. Men are naturally risk takers and explorers, they like to master things. Knowing that they’re needed motivates them, and they want respect from their peers, specifically from other guys.
But that respect needs to come from doing pro-social things that make life better in some way, not from outdrinking their buddies or doing some stupid shit better than them. Popular films and television shows, unfortunately, present few alternatives to this latter image of guys.
Programs on TV could use more men with triple-digit IQs. Why the overwhelming majority of men’s characters are testosterone-driven meatheads, FBI agents, obsessed chefs, vampires, womanizers or overweight men with really hot wives is perhaps not such a mystery. A recent University of Maryland study concluded that unhappy people watch significantly more TV.
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That makes sense — TV is passive, provides an escape and is an easy way to tune out. Drama is an amazing distraction. When you can watch tanned guidos duke it out like two betta fish in a small aquarium, you feel less inadequate about your own life. Disharmony seems to be appealing, too. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in
Anna Karenina
, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Watch one show about happy people and you’ve seen them all?
The problem is, without better role models in real life, guys become confused about what acceptable male behavior is. Violence and sex, two overrepresented topics in media and underrepresented topics in conversation, become especially unclear. “It’s very confusing to little boys … all around them they see violence on the news, on television, on video games — and at the same time, they’re getting the message that the fantasies that boys seem to have always had are bad. … I think the danger is giving the boys who are having those thoughts the idea that it says something bad about them as people,” says Jane Katch, kindergarten teacher and author of
Far Away from the Tigers
.
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Farrell elaborated on this point by saying many young boys unconsciously learn that sex is dirtier and worse than killing, because parents will allow their kids to watch a Western in which people kill each other but will turn off the TV or change the channel when there’s nudity or sex. At age 13 or 14, the message comes across to boys that they want sex more than girls do — or that the girls who initiate sex are untrustworthy — so they feel they must take on the role of initiator. Naturally, there is a huge fear of rejection. Sex on TV and porn reduce that fear of rejection. If a guy doesn’t perceive himself among the best performers, he believes the girl he is most attracted to will reject him. Watching television and porn requires no commitment and has a zero rate of rejection; it provides instant gratification that can alleviate the fear to some degree. As a side effect, however, it also reduces the motivation to get the skills needed to attract the girl, creating further distance between a man and his ultimate goal.
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One young man from our survey noted:
In a postfeminism generation, gender roles are unclear. Men in their late 20s to early 30s today were raised to be sensitive and caring, and to hide any aggressive impulses, but find this gets them nowhere. Women in their 20s to early 30s talk about feminine empowerment but are still only sexually attracted to overt displays of strength and aggression. Sensitivity, politeness and asking what a woman wants are extreme turnoffs because they are perceived as weakness. Not only is being a new kind of man a turnoff, it also keeps me from making the first move because I learned to worry about forcing myself onto the object of my desire, to not be crass or slimy, to not use pickup lines, etc. But there are no clearly defined rules for what I should be doing, just a set of things that I shouldn’t do — all the things that would elicit results. … I’ll just go play video games, thanks.”
A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain, for they were just out of reach. So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and unconcern, remarking, “I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
— Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes”
In stressful situations, many of us adjust our understanding of what’s going on to preserve our sense of self. The core message of “The Fox and the Grapes” tale is not in the fox’s failure to get the grapes but in his reaction to that failure. He maintains his pride by a wee bit of self-deception. “And therein lies the appeal,” says D.L. Ashliman, professor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. “Each individual reader can respond to the fox’s self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and positive self-image.”
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The fox’s response preserved the integrity of his self-image. Stanford University social psychologist Claude Steele was the first to describe the theory of self-affirmation, in 1988. Psychologists David Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen described it in their own research nearly two decades later:
[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth. … One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such “self
affirmations,” by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases.
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Guys’ attitudes are similar to the fox’s. The ego reigns king in American society today, and our delusional self-perceptions have dissociated us from mundane reality. Most people confuse comfort with happiness, preferring familiarity to truth. Our politically correct culture has become stifling for any form of critical analysis. Although stigmatizing people with labels can be damaging, it also allows people to externalize their problems and avoid taking personal responsibility to improve themselves. The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what’s happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out:
Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it. … Sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue. … The dump became a landfill. … Partly cloudy became partly sunny. … Room service became guest room dining. Constipation became occasional irregularity. … The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore. They neutralize people. Or they depopulate the area. The government doesn’t lie. It engages in misinformation.
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Our culture is presenting a confusing and unfulfilling reality full of distorted ideals and truths. Guys are told they can be anything they want to be, but it doesn’t feel that way. With modern pressures to constantly perform flawlessly in all areas of life — school, career, socially, sexually — it’s no wonder guys seek validation and refuge in other environments like porn and video games or even gangs, or are relieved when their anxiety or depression is diagnosed and given a label that other dudes also share, like attention-deficit disorder (ADD).
Poet and philosopher Robert Bly and psychoanalyst Marion Woodman call this confrontation with reality “the Great Disappointment.” Leonard Sax, an American psychologist and family physician, says our culture does a terrible job of preparing kids for the moment when they realize they’re not going to be the next big thing:
The spiritual condition of the child before the onset of puberty [is] characterized by the feeling that “something marvelous is going to happen.” Then sometime after the onset of puberty, navigating through adolescence, the teenager is hit with the awareness that something marvelous is not going to happen. That’s the moment of The Great Disappointment. In our culture, that moment is often postponed until young adulthood, when the 20-something finally realizes that she isn’t ever going to compete in the Olympics or be the next American Idol or a movie star. Adolescence should be the time when kids learn about their own limits. In a world that contains more than six billion people, 99.999 percent of us are going to have to get used to the idea that we are not anybody special. Becoming a mature adult means reconciling yourself to the fact that you’re not going to be a movie star, you’re not going to be on the cover of
People
magazine, you’re not going to be famous. Our culture today does a terrible job of preparing kids for this moment and helping them to make the transition to full adulthood. … When boys encounter The Great Disappointment, many of them find solace in the world of video games. If you’re a boy or young man and you invest 20 hours or more each week playing
Call of Duty, you can indeed become master of that universe. And for many boys, that is satisfaction enough.
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In general, as long as guys have easy sexual access to attractive women, they feel no need to exert more energy, time or money to get female attention. This is particularly evident on college campuses. The American Council on Education recently reported that campus ratios are now about 57 percent women to 43 percent guys.
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Not incidentally, the number of romantic relationships has drastically decreased and casual sex has greatly increased, with women exhibiting sexual patterns similar to those of young men — of being hunters, not just gatherers.
The Guttentag-Secord theory was first presented by Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord in their 1983 book,
Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question
. They suggested that members of the sex in smaller supply are less reliant on their partners because many potential relationships are available to them, thus they have more “dyadic power” — the upper hand — over members of the surplus sex. When confronted with an abundance of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship. In societies with too many women, or too few “marriageable” men, fewer people marry, and the ones who do will do so later in life. Since men take advantage of a variety of available partners, women’s traditional roles are devalued, and because these women can’t rely on their partners to stick around, more of them turn to furthering their education or career to support themselves.
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One female college student from our survey reflected this concern:
I think one of the biggest challenges will be the effect this will have on family dynamics. Today’s well-educated, empowered, successful women don’t want lame, slacker husbands, and most men don’t want to feel inferior to their wives. Will this push us into becoming more of an individual, rather than a family-based, society?
“Men are as good as their women require them to be,” said one 27-year-old guy we interviewed. This statement made us wonder about how easy access to sex affects men’s motivation to achieve other life goals. Could there be a spillover from easy sexual access to assuming other goals can also be achieved with only minimal effort and planning? It could be argued that our goals are fueled by evolution and that the majority of our efforts are just part of one big elaborate mating ritual. But in the past, the prize — a sexual partner (and propagating one’s genetics) — would have been the reward for hard work, or at least some wise planning. Today the reward is essentially free and available
before
any hard work has been done, so what’s left? It’s like downing dessert before dinner.
A young woman Sax interviewed in his book,
Girls on the Edge: the Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls
, said, “Guys today just don’t know how to satisfy a woman. The guys just want ‘wham, bam, thank-you ma’am.’ They don’t care about building a relationship.” Sax pointed out that because boys and girls are becoming sexually active at an earlier age than in their parent’s generation, boys are more egocentric and less mature, and that there’s been a cultural shift from dating towards “hooking up,” with boys feeling less of an obligation to care about the girls.
The growing influence of porn culture plays some role here as well. Most young men today will tell you that they visit porn sites. Some of them will even enthusiastically describe to you the features of their favorite sites. Given the choice between masturbating over online pornography and going out on a date with a real girl — that is to say, a girl who doesn’t look like a porn star and isn’t wearing lingerie — more and more young men tell me that they prefer online porn. “Girls online are way better looking,” one young man said to me, with no apology or embarrassment.
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Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.
— Noam Chomsky, linguist and social-political critic
The cost of a gallon of gas, school tuition and a house are now out of proportion for young people in comparison to the Baby Boomer generation that has parented this generation. Because it’s more expensive to live in America now than before the economic slump, many Americans are taking on large amounts of additional debt to make ends meet. Equity strategist Peter Boockvar says, “The absolute cost of living is now back at a record high, [but America] has 7 million less jobs.”
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Americans generally feel they have more opportunity to get ahead than their parents but are more exposed to economic risk as well, whites being much more uncertain than minorities.
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In 1970, a new house in the U.S. cost $17,000, and the median household income was $8,730. The average yearly tuition of public university was $480; private was $1,980. In 1990, the average cost of a new house increased to $79,100, and the median household income was $29,943. The average yearly tuition of public university was $5,243.
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In 2010, the average cost of a new house was $221,800 and the median household income was $49,445. The average cost of public university was $15,014 (2009-10 academic year).
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Now it costs more to send kids to private elementary school than it used to cost to go to Harvard, Yale or Stanford University.
Has the cost of living caused men to see the idea of family not as the reward of one’s hard work but, rather, as a burden and the cause of having to work hard? To many young men, the future looks bleak, and they wonder how they will ever be able to afford a house, children and retirement. The higher prices of schooling across the board no doubt have had an effect on how men are planning their lives. In addition, in this recession three men have lost their jobs for every woman who has lost hers.
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SOURCE: U
NKNOWN
Man’s Math
This amusing equation is all over the Web. Sadly, many young men draw the same conclusion.
Many students who go into serious debt for low-value degrees grasp the realities of employment only upon graduation — that there isn’t a real job awaiting them and their diploma isn’t an assured route for success. A whole generation of young people, who were told they could be anything they put their minds to, are being thrown into a junkyard of mass unemployment, settling for less than their ideal job just to make it. Without the real possibility of ever becoming the family breadwinner, young men are having to deal with feelings of anticipated failure. If they can’t be the alpha guy, what new roles are available for them?
