Stay tuned...

To those who've tuned in recently: I've been slow to post due to work-related obligations. Watch for more Adventures in Guyland closer to the end of May.

You Can Go Home Again (and Probably Will)

It's early May. Here on College Hill in Easton PA the dogwood trees and lilac bushes are in bloom. At night, gaggles of drunken seniors stumble past our window to pee or puke in the nearby bushes.

Graduation is just around the corner. And time for another round of stories about the high percentage of these kids who will move back in with their folks.

If only Thomas Wolfe had been more of a trend-spotter and less a writer of unwieldy tomes.

Whether it's because of the heavy burden of student debt, the exorbitant cost of apartments, or simply the chance to save some money before heading out into the world, 65 percent of college graduates will move back home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Naturally, our faltering economy can't be helping this situation; and I suspect the trend (and the stories!) will only increase. As of 2006, 56 percent of men and 43 percent of women ages 18 to 24 lived at home.

Several years ago, when I first started reading about this phenomenon, the kids were supposed to be suffering some sort of "quarterlife" crisis. These days they're simply part of a "boomerang" generation. The media, always quick with a handy label, is also full of advice for both the parents and kids.

(There's a similar and even more recent trend of grown adults moving in with their parents--Hey, Mom, can you pass me my Viagra!-- but I'll leave that to others).

The funny thing about this new Generation Homeward Bound is that it doesn't strike me as all that different from what was happening when I graduated college in 1990. Back then I had several friends who ended up back at home at one point or another, often for some of the same reasons cited in today's stories: they couldn't afford the rents in Hoboken or Berkeley; or couldn't hack New York; or were saving up money for graduate school. Wikipedia's entry on Quarterlifers manages to trace the antecedents for this term to everyone from Erik Erikson to Benjamin Braddock (i.e. The Graduate) to St. Elmo's Fire.

Of course, the difference today is one of magnitude: there's the categorically different debt-load that overwhelms many new graduates. Moreover, both parents and kids in America are more enmeshed in each others life than ever before. (According to a recent Pew Research Center story, 8 in 10 young adults 18-25 had talked to their parents in the past days; and nearly half see their parents daily. Three-quarters said their parents had helped them financially in the previous year).

As you can see by everything I've written, this has much less to do with gender and much more to do with economic and cultural trends. Indeed, Jeffrey Arnett, the psychologist who coined the term "emerging adulthood," told me in a recent email exchange that while he'd expected there to be a lot of differences between men and women in his research, he was surprised to discover the opposite.

Another way of framing this is to note that many of the trends which result in stories such as "Man-child in the Promised Land" (see below) have less to do with young men and far more to do with young people more generally. Still, if there's a particular aspect of male identity to all this, I suspect it has to do with the added confusion that greets young guys when they move back into their childhood rooms. After all, as much as masculinity has shifted over the past 40 years, Americans still largely expect men to be self-reliant; to be providers--not provided for.

At any rate, I've read that Henry David Thoreau, that paragon of magnificent solitude, was said to have wept when his mother suggested moving out of the house after graduation from Harvard at age 20. Perhaps Thoreau was simply indicative of a trend far older than labels like quarterlife crisis suggest. What comes around goes around.

Come to think of it, isn't that another way of saying "boomerang?"

“If you don’t feel like blowing stuff up, you can jump in a cop car and run over criminals.”

So if 20-something guys aren't all the babe-chasing, Xbox-playing caricatures that haunt Kay Hymowitz's fevered dreams (see previous post), who exactly are they?

Stay tuned for some interviews.

In the meantime, it turns out that contrary to what Hymowitz might suspect, at least some young men playing Xbox are indeed married with children--and just looking for some escapist fun. An article in last Monday's Times, about the new release of the videogame Grand Theft Auto IV, quotes one 27-year-old Oklahoma man, a floor manager at a tribal casino. J. R. Jobe has says he's been putting aside a little bit from his weekly paycheck--after the rent, the gas, and the kids' lunches--for a $60 escape.

“My wife wants me to go shopping or go to P.T.A. meetings, and sometimes I don’t want to do that,” he said. He thinks he is entitled to something in return. “I explain to her: When I get off work, it’s my way to calm down. It’s like my cigarette.”

This guy clearly feels that some major aspects of his domestic setup don't give him time for himself (I think: welcome to parenthood, buddy). I also wonder if he thinks something about P.T.A. meetings and shopping are feminizing. If so, he'd join a loud chorus of people who talk about all the ways in which contemporary culture, education, and religion are feminizing (and thus alienating) for men.

In the meantime, I want to blog more in another post about the lure of videogames themselves. I mean, clearly they are a component of young men's lives. Apparently, sales of the $60 game will top five million within two weeks of release--this at a time when large chunks of the third world are rioting for their next meal and the cost for a tank of gas brings up thoughts of a second mortgage.

One business school professor in the Times points to the "superstimulating artificial environment" in which "players face constant challenges and receive instant feedback."

Our casino manager puts it another way: “You can go along with the stories, which are pretty good, or you can just play around and blow stuff up...[i]f you don’t feel like blowing stuff up, you can jump in a cop car and run over criminals.”

And if running over criminals isn't superstimulating enough? I shudder to think.

The Return of the Mannish-Boy

Everywhere I look these days I see growing evidence of the dreaded "Man-child", the regressed guy who can't seem to grow up and take responsibility for his actions and himself, preferring to hide behind roommates or parents or girlfriends. The signs are everywhere you look...at least in popular culture.

For some time now he's been the subject of contemporary novels (Nick Hornsby's High Fidelity or About A Boy; several hilarious novels by Tom Perrotta, including The Wishbones; or Benjamin Kunkel’s Indecision). He's also been the subject of a spate of recent movies (Failure To Launch, 40 Year Old Virgin and especially last summer's Knocked Up.) And he is the bane of every of every blind date or one-night-stand story. To whit: Last Sunday's New York Times' "Modern Love" column ("Was I on a Date or Baby-Sitting?"), which promised a contemporary rock'n'roll spin on this story (though the title proved a bit misleading.

More recently the Man-child has moved beyond the sights of filmmakers and novelists, and dropped into the cross-hairs of many a cultural critic, some of whom suggest that a delay in marriage and babies has produced an entire generation of Mannish boys. Most notable among these broadsides may be Kay Hymowitz's lengthy essay "Child-Man in the Promised Land". Originally published in the Winter 2008 Issue of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal (where Hymowitz is a contributing writer) the piece caused quite a ruckus in the blogosphere after an excerpt ran in the Dallas Morning News.

Hymowitz argues that by postponing the twin responsibilities of marriage and baby-making that anchored their parents' generation, today's young guys are reduced to Xbox-playing, babe-chasing, hair gel-buying n'er-do-wells, who are further indulged by an infantilizing "lad culture" and compromised flicks like Knocked Up.

Hymowitz paints a sorry picture indeed:

You've finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face – and then it's off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

If you can't quite visualize a living, breathing human being in Hymowitz's description, you're not alone. Hymowitz doesn't seem to let something as trivial as complexity get in the way of a good argument.

Worse, though, is the reason for her concern. Is she worried these guys may not become all they could be? Not really. It's just that Mannish boys make lousy husbands:

[T]he problem with child-men is that they're not very promising husbands and fathers. They suffer from a proverbial "fear of commitment," another way of saying that they can't stand to think of themselves as permanently attached to one woman. Sure, they have girlfriends; many are even willing to move in with them. But cohabiting can be just another Peter Pan delaying tactic....

Despite these (rather glaring) flaws, Hymowitz is correct in one respect: there does seem to be something going on with young men; even though it extends to young women as well. To a large extent, her piece depends a lot on the recent concept of “emerging adulthood” by psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, who argues that in the past half-century, as both men and women put off marriage and children until later, a new transitional stage between ages 18 and 25 has opened up.

Otherwise Hymowitz seems to me to be like one of the poor fools in Plato's metaphoric cave, mistaking the shadows on the wall for real life. Her essay conflates the characters of recent film and fiction with the reality of young men’s lives. (Are all or even most 20-something men as shlubby and pitiful as Knocked Up’s Ben Stone?) Furthermore, with parents whose marriage ended in divorce--as with so many of my peers (I'm 40)--I would never look to that era as a model for any kind of relationship.

“Dave M,” a shrewd poster on a blog maintained by The Walrus magazine, cuts to the heart of Hymowitz's problem:

...what’s really appalling is that hymowitz doesn’t pause to consider that maybe a culture that expected men and women to couple up before they fully understood the necessity and gravity of that commitment might have something to do with the spike in the divorce rate over the last few decades. the child-man generation is by and large the generation born of the societally-legitimized divorce, and if there’s a lesson any sane person would take from growing up among the remnants of a shattered marriage, it’s that maybe you shouldn’t enter into heavy commitments like marriage and children until you’re good and ready.

Read his full comments.

Welcome!

I've been writing about male identity since a 2005 Boston Globe piece on the "Mythopetic Men's Movement." Now I want to focus more on the way young guys--especially those in their 20s and 30s, who have grown up since the advances of 1970s feminism--are responding to the dramatic ways in which male identity has shifted in that time.

I look forward to blogging about those dramatic shifts themselves, but the ways in which male identity and contemporary masculinity gets played out in the media, in the movies, and in American culture more generally.