It's not our fault: Why men have turned into man-children

Men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult male identity since at least the mid-nineteenth century.

Globalization, improved productivity, and a digital revolution propelled a massive shift in the economy, away from manufacturing to knowledge and services—to women's great advantage. “The post-industrial economy is indifferent to men's size and strength,” explains Hanna Rosin in her popular article “The End of Men.”

Young men are not showing the same focus or resilience that supervisors and professors notice among women. This is not the case for all men by any means. Plenty of guys graduate college with a résumé to rival or surpass the most enterprising alpha girls. But there is a large and prominent group of men who hit their twenties and seem unsure what's expected of them

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Men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult male identity since at least the mid-nineteenth 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. 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, such as hunting and fishing.

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The arrival in the 1950s of Playboy seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication—think of the refusal of adult manhood implied by the title alone. The playboy was a prologue for the contemporary child-man in his disregard for domestic life.

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By the 2000s, young men were tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with such overgrown boy actors as Steve Carrell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, and Seth Rogen, the star of the aforementioned Knocked Up, and cheered their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, explosions, beer pong competitions, and other frat-boy pranks.

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Commentators most commonly describe these juvenile pre -

dilections as evidence of a media-inspired backlash against feminism.

Boys went to school thinking they were going on a journey to the top jobs, goes the theory, and what they got instead was a girl-powered campus and labor market. They have rebelled by pledging themselves to the Guy Code—the term comes from the sociologist Michael Kimmel—treating women as objects of hormonal revenge and making “you're-so-gay” quips with their bros.

More likely, the child-man is a reaction to a widespread cultural uncertainty about men, an uncertainty considerably aggravated by

preadulthood. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that

whereas girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity,

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 of women and children; this was always their primary social role. Today, however, with women moving ahead in an advanced economy, provider husbands and fathers are now optional, and the character qualities men had needed to play their role—fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity—are obsolete and even a little embarrassing.

This makes the preadult man something 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 can't act too bossy or selfconfident. 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 dudes 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. If, without an adult male playbook, some of them live in rooms decorated with Star Wars posters and crushed beer cans and treat women like disposable estrogen toys, well, we can be disgusted, but we shouldn't be surprised.