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.
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.
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