The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
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62 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “Digital entertainment (i.e., video games, pornography).”
66 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
63 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “No clear direction/Lack of goal setting.”
Survey highlights:
64 percent of boys age 12 and younger chose “Ensure there are both male and female counselors.”
73 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “Offer more advanced learning programs for students who show interest or ability.”
75 percent of guys age 18 through 34 chose “Teach more practical subjects and skills.”
Survey highlights:
The following groups all chose “Young men in the U.S. will not be as innovative or capable as their peers in other First World countries”:
65 percent of guys age 13 through 17.
66 percent of guys age 18 through 25.
75 percent of guys age 26 through 34.
74 percent of all respondents age 35 and older.
Survey highlights:
The following groups all chose “Give young men a creative space where they can express themselves”:
89 percent of boys age 12 and younger.
72 percent of guys age 13 through 17.
74 percent of guys age 18 through 25.
68 percent of guys age 26 through 34.
Survey highlights:
78 percent of boys age 12 and younger chose “Provide a sense of mastery and control.”
84 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “They’re fun and easily accessible.”
85 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
84 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “Provide instant gratification.”
Survey highlights:
67 percent of boys age 12 and younger, and
69 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “Increase in problem-solving skills.”
63 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “Games can be social and provide an environment for male bonding.”
67 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
69 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “Increase in problem-solving skills.”
Survey highlights:
58 percent of guys age 13 through 17, and
60 percent of guys age 18 through 25, chose “Stress reliever/Positive psychological effects.”
51 percent of guys age 26 through 34 chose “Fulfills sexual needs.”
51 percent of all participants age 35 and older chose “None of the these/Other.”
Survey highlights:
76 percent of women age 18 through 25, and
78 percent of women age 26 through 34, chose “Emotional immaturity or unavailability.”
57 percent of guys age 13 through 17,
59 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
58 percent of guys age 26 through 34 chose “Lack of interest in pursuing or maintaining a romantic relationship/Social isolation.”
What’s going on?
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.
— Wallace Stegner, historian and novelist
Boys haven’t changed a whole lot in recent years, but the environments in which they socialize, go to school, woo girls and mature have. If we take a closer look at their worlds we can better understand what the data that we just reviewed means. In this section we’ll briefly examine the main situational and systemic factors that influence young guys’ thoughts and behaviors, including cultural changes, medication and illegal drug use, social needs, and what’s happening in schools, within families and among peers.
Bros before hos: Social intensity syndrome
In the film My Fair Lady (based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion), lead actor Rex Harrison has just achieved his successful transformation of a poor flower shop girl into a stunningly beautiful sophisticated lady, played by Audrey Hepburn. When she becomes distressed that he fails to show her any affection or even recognition for all she has done to so dramatically modify her entire being, and perhaps would like a bit of romance as well, he rudely dismisses her. Harrison then sings a song of lament to his buddy, Pickering. Its title is Why can’t a woman be more like a man?18:
Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historic’ly fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can’t a woman be like that?
In doing so, he reveals what we believe is actually a common set of attitudes and values held by most men: a deep preference for male company and bonding over association or even mating with women.
This phenomenon is one that Phil has labeled the social intensity syndrome (SIS). The key dimensions of this new view of essential maleness are outlined as follows:
Men, more than women, are attracted to social settings that involve the ubiquitous presence of a group of other men, over an extended time period.
That attraction is greater the more intense the nature of the relationship, the more exclusive it is of tolerating “outsiders” or those who have not qualified for that group membership, and the more embedded each man is perceived to be within that group.
Examples of such social groups are the military — especially during boot camp and deployment — gangs, contact team sports, fraternities, prisons, some cults and neighborhood bars and pubs.
Men experience a positive arousal — such as cortisol, adrenergic system activation or testosterone increase — when they feel they are part of such all-male social groups.
Men gradually adapt to that level of social intensity contact as an optimally desired personal and social state.
Over time, that degree of social intensity becomes a “set point” of desirable functioning, operating at a nonconscious level of awareness.
Men experience a sense of social isolation and then boredom immediately following their separation from such socially intense male group settings — when having to function in mixed-gender groups or family settings.
Men may experience withdrawal symptoms when removed from such socially intense group settings; symptoms are greater the longer and more intense the prior duration of their group participation has been.
Social intensity syndrome is the descriptive term for this complex of values, attitudes and behaviors organized around personal attraction to and subconscious desire to maintain association with these male-dominated social groupings.
And this phenomenon peaks on Super Bowl Sunday, when many guys would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally overdressed Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ star quarterback, than with a totally naked Jennifer Lopez in their bedroom.
This hidden desire to be part of the “guy thing” is double-edged, though. It must not become too intimate and personal for fear of seeming gay. So that enforces a rule of superficiality and of nontouching other guys, except for high-fives, chest bumping and shots in the arm.
It is possible to generate some interesting predictions of possible behavioral consequences for men with high SIS levels. They will do some or all of the following:
Respond to the negative effect of disengagement from such groups by engaging in arousing activities, such as high-risk ventures, daring deeds, arguments and fights, drinking to excess, gambling, speeding and similar actions.
Feel less comfortable having women as friends.
Spend more time in symbolic male groups, such as watching sports in a sports bar or even engaging in fantasy football or baseball competitions.
Report high levels of boredom after separating from the socially intense grouping.
Recall greater positive and fewer negative aspects of one’s time in those male-bonding groups.
Deal with the arousal deficit by seeking redeployment if in the military.
Deal with the arousal deficit by hanging around sett
ings where there are likely to be other men who also belong to such high-intensity groupings, such as soldiers hanging around VA hospital lobbies or sports fans becoming team “fanatics.”
Be more likely to engage in spouse abuse, especially when drinking, and more likely to become divorced or separate from mates with whom they had a positive relationship prior to deployment or team membership.
Be more likely to develop generally negative attitudes toward women as “the other” who do not understand them, and prefer pornography and sex with prostitutes or erotic massage parlor “therapists” to consensual sexual relationships with equal-status female mates.
Paradoxically, then, males can get such generalized arousal merely from being in the presence of other men in group settings but must avoid showing or even experiencing feelings of intimacy in those associations for fear of being perceived as homosexual or, worse, giving into homosexual impulses. Then when they are presented with the prospect of intimacy with a woman, the opposite response occurs: They may fail to get aroused.
Social intensity syndrome is prevalent worldwide. In Japan, young men are increasingly apathetic to sex. Even married couples have less sex. “Over a third of men ages 16 to 19 had no interest in sex, double the figure from 2008, and over 40 percent of those married have been sexless for at least the past month,”19 reported the Japan Times in a recent article covering research done by Kunio Kitamura of the Clinic of the Japan Family Planning Association. The phenomenon is so common, these men have been given a name: “soshokukei danshi,” or “herbivorous men,” in contrast to carnivorous men, who still perform sex.
One particularly poignant response to our TED survey came from a young male student at Bard College in New York:
I must admit that I haven’t had one real physical relationship in my entire life. I’m a complete extrovert who has a core group of [male] friends along with a whole bunch of other friends [including some women] but has always been rather unsure when it comes to women. I feel like I can’t really interact with them, and end up treating them like men, which makes them my friend but not someone who is a romantic interest. … I would definitely rather hang out with my friends and enjoy the company of a small group of guy friends where we hang out and relax.
Get everything, do nothing
A highly educated female colleague alerted us to another new phenomenon. It is the sense of total entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships with marriage or live-in partners. Guys don’t want to work either at jobs that will bring in money or even at household chores that will keep their abode tidy. They are content to just hang around doing their thing but perform nothing that traditionally resembles “work.” They feel it is their right to absent themselves from having to make money or do drudgery around the pad. In a sense, they are like old-fashioned gigolos, attractive men who were taken care of by older women in return for being charming dates/mates/sexual adventurers. That description does not fit this new breed of guys who want it all in return for no giveback. Consider a couple of the vignettes she shared with us:
A physical therapist I know married a guy who basically quit his job once they got married. She did all the work and all the housework. She would come home after a long day at work, schlepping her heavy equipment through the rain, and he would not even come out to help her carry anything. When she got in, he would ask her what was for dinner, and she would have to go back out to the store and come home and cook. He sat on his ass all day and did nothing. Nice guy, handsome, but did not work or want to work. She divorced him after four years of marriage.
Another academic I know gets together with this guy who quits his job to go back to graduate school. He incurs a $100,000 debt and is not able to get a steady job. She supports him although he is not willing to get married nor willing to help with any house chores.
Why do women stick it out with such guys? Even their mothers might call them losers. The depressing alternative for these well-educated women is no guy at all, so they stick with their bad decision until it gets so unbearable that they decide to dump the dude.
Aside from not understanding that all relationships involve a negotiation of rights and obligations, what this entitlement suggests to us is the abandonment of a sense of having to work for anything. These men are acting as if one gets what one wants just by being at the head of the line when the doors open or the party starts.
A young British man told us this in his survey comments:
It is my belief that entitlement can help shape men. What they are entitled to is responsibility. The achievement is fulfillment of responsibility that will let the world trust them to shape the future. Yes, men can be strong if they care about others. Responsibilities — such as to being gentle and a gentleman, manners to others to show courtesy, to take on duties to reassure others, being selfless — will help a young man find himself. … The key to being a man lies in responsibility. The responsibility to care about oneself and not ruin or abuse oneself, to care about others and not ruin or abuse them.
We could not agree more. But it seems to us that this new sense of male entitlement is different from what it may have been in the past. It is more generalized, spreading to more settings and activities that tend to undermine any meaningful social or romantic relationships. These men seem to be emulating successful media celebrities who appear to have it all, but they see and admire only the desirable outcomes and products. What is missing from the analysis is any appreciation of what goes into any kind of success: a lot of hard work, trial and tribulation, practice, failures that are part and parcel of the process of trying to attain a goal. The good things in life usually take a commitment to success, to delaying gratification, to putting work before play and to understanding the importance and vitality of the Social Contract — giving to others with the assumption of reciprocal giving back.
Changing families
Throughout history the vast majority of humans lived in multigenerational, often multifamily, groups with an approximate ratio of four adults to every one child. Essentially there would have been two parents yet many other caregivers in the picture: siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins. Today, however, with classroom ratios at about one teacher per 30 students, with only one or two parents living at home and with great distances between extended family members, children have far fewer quality relationships with adults. Today the average household size is three or fewer.20 Furthermore, these ever-shrinking family units spend less time together, especially quality time like sharing a sit-down meal. Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry, authors of Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered, suggest this lack of relational richness is having a negative effect on our culture’s capacity to care for others.
As infants we depend on our primary caregivers — first mom and then dad — to feed us when we’re hungry and protect us when we’re threatened. In other words, our parents regulate our stress until we are able to self-regulate, and how they respond to stress affects the way our stress response develops. Our earliest interactions with mom will serve as a kind of template for how we react to future human contact. But lately there has been a problem; mothers are under constant stress. And if a mother is under stress, if she’s not being nurtured, it’s far less likely she’s going to be able to provide consistent nurturing for her baby or youngster.
Furthermore, stress is regulated by social systems; the brain regions involved in social relationships are the same ones that control stress response. They develop together, and therefore development problems in the stress response can interfere with the development of social and emotional functioning and vice versa.21
With 40 percent of children born to single mothers today22 (more than 50 percent for children born to women under 3023), who is nurturing the mothers who raise these children? How will these children deal with stress when they have their own children? Moreover, as human lifespan increases, there is an ever larger number of older relatives in elderly care facilities. Who is respon
sible for visiting them regularly and dealing with their survival issues, even their basic legal and accounting problems? Their daughters — the same overstressed moms — must deal with this new stress of caring for beloved parents who are feeble, suffering memory losses and are able to give back little affection to their grown girls.
One place where families used to talk, exchanging experiences, ideas, values and more, was around the dinner table. That is now an ancient tradition, honored more in the breach than in practice. USA Today newspaper did a survey 25 years ago on the “time crunch” that Americans increasingly felt. One alarming statistic uncovered was that only 60 percent — three in five — families said life was more hectic than five years ago and they were not able to do things like have regular sit-down family dinners.24 “Today less than 3 in 5 teens report having dinner with their parents. According to the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse, compared with teens that have 5 to 7 family dinners a week, teens who have infrequent family dinners (fewer than 3 times a week) are almost four times more likely to use tobacco, twice as likely to use alcohol, two and a half times likelier to use marijuana, and nearly four times likelier to predict personal drug use in the future.”25
Unstable role models, tarnished trust
Divorce isn’t easy for anyone. But it’s not so much the divorce itself that affects young people’s perceptions of relationships as it is how the parents handle the situation. Many children lose faith in relationships because they watch their parents become emotionally unstable and react irrationally, sometimes violently.