The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It

by Philip G. Zimbardo

  The Demise of Guys

  Why Boys Are Struggling and

  What We Can Do About It

  By

  Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan

  The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.

  Copyright © 2012 by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by TED Conferences, LLC.

  No part of this publication may be used or reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review and certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at:

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  Published simultaneously in the United States and wherever access to Amazon and the iBookstore is available.

  First edition.

  First published May 2012.

  ISBN: 978-1-937382-12-4.

  TED is a registered trademark, and the TED colophon is a trademark of TED Conferences, LLC.

  Table of Contents

  A search for solutions

  The demise of guys

  Behind the headlines

  TED survey: the tribe has spoken

  What’s going on?

  Bros before hos: Social intensity syndrome (SIS)

  Get everything, do nothing

  Changing families

  Unstable role models, tarnished trust

  Helicopter parents

  Where’s Dad?

  The media isn’t doing you any favors

  The truth shall bite thee in the ass

  Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free?

  High costs of living driving down personal and social values

  School’s out — now what?

  Who’s failing whom?

  High on life, or high on something

  Back away from the doughnut

  Just press Play: Porn and video games

  Dynamics of porn

  Chronic stimulation, chronic dissatisfaction

  Dude, where’s my erection?

  Sex education vs. porn

  Dating and the objectification of women

  Dynamics of video games

  When video games go wrong

  Preparing for cyberwar

  When video games go right

  Billy is in his room

  The rise of gals

  What we can do

  Next steps: Join us

  Notes

  Recommended resources

  About the authors

  About TED

  A search for solutions

  This book is a discussion about young men and some of the important issues and challenges they face. We’re presenting this work in the hope of finding solutions. Fair warning: Our discussions will be frank and our language direct. Problems get dealt with and maybe solved only when they are talked about openly and honestly. When you’re done reading, please visit our website (demiseofguys.com) to continue the discussions we’ve begun. Or watch the original TEDTalk “The Demise of Guys?” on ted.com.

  The demise of guys

  Everyone knows a young man who is struggling. Maybe he’s undermotivated in school, has emotional disturbances, doesn’t get along with others, has few real friends or no girl friends, or is in a gang. He may even be in prison. Maybe he’s your son or relative. Maybe he’s you.

  In record numbers, guys are flaming out academically, wiping out socially with girls and failing sexually with women.

  Asking what’s wrong with these young men or why they aren’t motivated the same way guys used to be isn’t the right question. Young men are motivated, just not the way other people want them to be. Society wants guys to be upstanding, proactive citizens who take responsibility for themselves, who work with others to improve their communities and nation as a whole. The irony is that society is not giving the support, means or places for these young men to even be motivated or interested in aspiring to these things. In fact, society — from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families — is a major contributor to this demise because they are inhibiting guys’ intellectual, creative and social abilities right from the start.

  Consequently, many guys lack purposeful direction and basic social skills. They’re living off, and often with, their parents well into their 20s and even 30s, expanding their childhood into an age once reserved for starting a family and making a career.

  Many young men who do manage to find a mate feel entitled to do nothing to add substance to that relationship beyond just showing up. New emasculating terms such as “man-child” and “moodle” (man-poodle) have emerged to describe men who haven’t matured emotionally or are otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves.

  Hollywood has caught on, too, to this awkward bunch of dudes, who appear to be tragically hopeless. Recent films such as Knocked Up, Failure to Launch, the Jackass series and Hall Pass present men as expendable commodities, living only for mindless fun and intricate but never-realized plans to get laid. Their female co-stars, meanwhile, are often attractive, focused and mature, with success-oriented agendas guiding their lives.

  The sense of being entitled to have things without having to work hard for them — attributed to one’s male nature — runs counter to the Protestant work ethic, as well as to the Vince Lombardi victory creed (“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”) These guys aren’t interested in maintaining long-term romantic relationships, marriage, fatherhood and being the head of their own family. Many have come to prefer the company of men over women, and they live to escape the so-called real world and readily slip into alternative worlds for stimulation. More and more they’re living in other worlds that exclude girls — or any direct social interaction, for that matter.

  Over the past decade, this pattern has escalated into adulthood where grown men remain like little boys, having difficulty relating to women as equals, friends, partners, intimates or even as cherished wives.

  We believe this demise can be traced to the rise of technology enchantment. From the earliest ages, guys are seduced into excessive and mostly isolated viewing and involvement with texting, tweeting, blogging, online chatting, emailing, and watching sports on TV or laptops. Most of all, though, they’re burying themselves in video games and in getting off on all-pervasive online pornography.

  In this book, we focus primarily on guys investing too much time and energy in the last two factors: playing video games and watching freely available Internet porn. Video game production companies are in fierce competition to make games that are ever more enticing, more provocative and, now, in 3-D. The same is true for pornography. Pornography is the fastest-growing global business, with production companies churning out daily doses of porn flicks in seemingly endless variety. The high-definition 3-D porn wave may also be coming (pun intended). The combination of excessive video game playing and pornography viewing is becoming addictive for a lot of guys. The next phase we imagine is transferring the player’s viewpoint onto the body of the protagonist to mesh realities and make digital environments totally egocentric.

  There are also other factors contributing to the demise of guys: widespread fatherlessness and changing family dynamics, media influences, environmentally generated physiological changes that decrease testosterone and increase estrogen,
the problematic economy and also the dramatic rise of gals.

  Behind the headlines

  This is the first time in U.S. history that our sons are having less education than their fathers.

  — Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power1

  Failing at school

  Are academics now more of a girl thing than a guy thing? It seems so. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school through graduate school. By eighth grade, for instance, only 20 percent of boys are proficient in writing and 24 percent proficient in reading.2 Young men’s SAT scores, meanwhile, in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in 40 years.3 According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of both high school and college.4 In Canada, five boys drop out of school for every three girls who do.5 Nationally, boys account for 70 percent of all the D’s and F’s given out at school.6 It is predicted that women will earn 60 percent of bachelor’s, 63 percent of master’s and 54 percent of doctorate degrees by 2016.7 Two-thirds of students in special education remedial programs are guys. These effects are much greater for males from minority backgrounds. The NCES also reported that boys are four to five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (ADHD),8 and therefore are more likely to be prescribed stimulants, such as Ritalin, even in elementary school.

  Video games: Mastering the universe — from your bedroom

  Here’s an astonishing fact: People spend a collective 3 billion hours a week playing video games. A week. Additionally, more than 174 million Americans are gamers. Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., estimates that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by age 21.9

  To put this figure in context, it takes the average college student half that time — 4,800 hours — to earn a bachelor’s degree. (This calculation is based on the average university requirement of 120 credit hours, with each credit hour involving 2.5 hours of homework and class time. Take an average of 15 hours of actual class time and 22.5 hours of homework outside of class each week — 37.5 hours — multiplied by 16 weeks per semester, multiplied by eight semesters, and you’ve got 4,800 hours. See also the table “Time Bandit.”)

  Some gamers are women, there is no doubt; and video game companies are very aware of this (FarmVille, anyone?). Still, girls don’t play nearly to the extent that guys do — only five hours per week to guys’ 13.10 The video game business is expected to be a $68 billion industry by the end of 2012.11 Compare this with the size of the entire U.S. publishing industry, which in 2010 had net sales revenue of $27.9 billion.12

  Porn: The marketplace of virtual pleasures

  The porn business is one of the fastest-growing industries in America and is now a nearly $100 billion industry worldwide. America is the top producer of pornographic Web pages, with 244.6 million, or 89 percent, of all porn Web pages worldwide.13 Just type “porn” into Google and you’ll get 1.38 billion results, with the entire first page of hits offering free instant streaming videos.

  Back in 2005, approximately 13,500 full-length commercially available pornographic films were released. Compare that with the 600 or so films released in Hollywood annually.14 Today there are many companies and outlets generating porn clips directly online in quantities not possible to accurately calculate.

  Who views all this stuff? You guessed it. One in three boys is now considered a “heavy” porn user, with the average boy watching nearly two hours of porn every week, according to University of Alberta (Canada) researcher Sonya Thompson.15 And that’s the average; just imagine what the outliers are doing! Add to the mix older guys watching adult videos online, at work, at home or in hotels across the country and around the world.

  One consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography every week, says Penny Marshall, British columnist for the U.K.’s Mail Online, is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects; according to a 16-year-old girl in Britain, “Boys just want us to do all the stuff that they see porn stars do.”16 As a result, says Cindy Gallop, a dynamic TED speaker and author of the TED Book Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior, young men don’t know the difference between making love and doing porn.

  Arousal addiction: Give me the same but different

  The addictiveness of video games and porn is a real concern for many reasons. As with all addictions, the activity becomes all-consuming and preferable to anything else in life — as every compulsive gambler, alcoholic or druggie will tell you. Video games and porn, however, are different from drink or drugs. We can think of them as “arousal addictions.” A major source of the continual arousal, whether it is in the cortex or the testes, is the novelty, the variety or the surprise factor of the content. Sameness is soon habituated; differentness is attention sustaining. And the video game and porn industries are supplying a virtually endless variety of variety.

  This new kind of addictive arousal traps users into an expanded present hedonistic time zone. Past and future are distant and remote, as the present moment expands to dominate everything. And that present is totally dynamic, with images changing constantly. Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way to demand change, novelty, excitement and constant stimulation. And their brains are being catered to by porn on demand and by video games at a flick of the switch or a click of the mouse. That means they are becoming totally out of sync in traditional school classes, which are analog, static and interactively passive. Academics are based on applying past lessons to future problems, on planning, on delaying gratifications, on work coming before play, on long-term goal setting.

  Do you sense misfits in a mismatch here? They’re also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which tend to build gradually and subtly and which require interaction, sharing, developing trust and suppression of lust at least until “the time is right.”

  The new shyness

  Phil pioneered research on shyness among adolescents and adults back in the 1970s and ’80s. He also founded the first clinic devoted to the treatment of shyness at Stanford University and then later in the local community (shyness.com).17 In those days, about 40 percent of a large population of Americans described themselves as “dispositionally shy” — that is, shyness was a major current trait that they possessed. An equal percentage reported that they had been shy in the past but had overcome its negative impact. And 15 percent said that their shyness was situationally induced, such as on blind dates, having to perform in public, being forced on relatives and so forth. So only 5 percent or so were true-blue never-ever shy. However, since then the percentage of those reporting being shy has steadily increased up to 60 percent. That rise has been correlated with increased use of technology, which minimizes direct, face-to-face social interaction. It also reduces social practice time and learning the many rules of constructive social dialoguing.

  A central causal influence triggering shyness was found to be a deep fear of social rejection. Thus, shy people behave awkwardly or inappropriately with superiors, experts, in novel situations and in one-on-one opposite-sex interactions. But with guided practice, even the most shy men and women can be trained to be “socially fit” in the shyness clinic.

  Aside from the steady increase in shyness, what is different today is that shyness among young men is less about a fear of rejection and more about fundamental social awkwardness — not knowing what to do, when, where or how. At least guys used to know how to dance. Now they don’t even know where to look for common ground, and they wander about the social landscape like tourists in a foreign land unable to ask for directions. They don’t know the language of face contact, the nonverbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk with and listen to somebody else and get them to respond back in kind. This lack of social interaction skills surfaces most especially wit
h desirable girls and women. The absence of such critical social skills, essential to navigating intimate social situations, encourages a strategy of retreat, going fail-safe. Girls equal likely failure; safe equals the retreat into online and fantasy worlds that, with regular practice, become ever more familiar, predictable and, in the case of video gaming, more controllable. A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world shrinks to the size of Billy’s bedroom.

  TED survey: The tribe has spoken

  In researching this book, we wanted our personal views to be challenged or validated by others interested in the topic. One way to do this was by developing a detailed online survey with a host of questions that touched on different aspects of our main theme. We created a survey of eight questions related to this topic and posted it alongside Phil’s “The Demise of Guys?” talk on the TED.com website. Remarkably, in barely two months, 20,000 people took the short survey. About three-quarters (76 percent) of the participants were guys; more than half were between 18 and 34 years old. But people of all ages and backgrounds and both sexes told us what they thought and felt about this issue and its subplots. In addition, thousands of respondents were sufficiently motivated to go further by adding personal comments, from a sentence to a page long. After reading all of them, we followed up with some of the respondents for personal interviews, and we’ll present a few of their comments later. Here are some of the highlights of the survey.

  Survey highlights:

  64 percent of boys age 12 and younger chose “Pressure to perform combined with fear of failing causes young men to not bother trying in the first place.”