[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened, people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth. … One way that this is accomplished is through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such “self affirmations,” by fulfilling the need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening events and information without resorting to defensive biases.45
Guys’ attitudes are similar to the fox’s. The ego reigns king in American society today, and our delusional self-perceptions have dissociated us from mundane reality. Most people confuse comfort with happiness, preferring familiarity to truth. Our politically correct culture has become stifling for any form of critical analysis. Although stigmatizing people with labels can be damaging, it also allows people to externalize their problems and avoid taking personal responsibility to improve themselves. The avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what’s happening around us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out:
Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it. … Sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue. … The dump became a landfill. … Partly cloudy became partly sunny. … Room service became guest room dining. Constipation became occasional irregularity. … The CIA doesn’t kill anybody anymore. They neutralize people. Or they depopulate the area. The government doesn’t lie. It engages in misinformation.46
Our culture is presenting a confusing and unfulfilling reality full of distorted ideals and truths. Guys are told they can be anything they want to be, but it doesn’t feel that way. With modern pressures to constantly perform flawlessly in all areas of life — school, career, socially, sexually — it’s no wonder guys seek validation and refuge in other environments like porn and video games or even gangs, or are relieved when their anxiety or depression is diagnosed and given a label that other dudes also share, like attention-deficit disorder (ADD).
Poet and philosopher Robert Bly and psychoanalyst Marion Woodman call this confrontation with reality “the Great Disappointment.” Leonard Sax, an American psychologist and family physician, says our culture does a terrible job of preparing kids for the moment when they realize they’re not going to be the next big thing:
The spiritual condition of the child before the onset of puberty [is] characterized by the feeling that “something marvelous is going to happen.” Then sometime after the onset of puberty, navigating through adolescence, the teenager is hit with the awareness that something marvelous is not going to happen. That’s the moment of The Great Disappointment. In our culture, that moment is often postponed until young adulthood, when the 20-something finally realizes that she isn’t ever going to compete in the Olympics or be the next American Idol or a movie star. Adolescence should be the time when kids learn about their own limits. In a world that contains more than six billion people, 99.999 percent of us are going to have to get used to the idea that we are not anybody special. Becoming a mature adult means reconciling yourself to the fact that you’re not going to be a movie star, you’re not going to be on the cover of People magazine, you’re not going to be famous. Our culture today does a terrible job of preparing kids for this moment and helping them to make the transition to full adulthood. … When boys encounter The Great Disappointment, many of them find solace in the world of video games. If you’re a boy or young man and you invest 20 hours or more each week playing Call of Duty, you can indeed become master of that universe. And for many boys, that is satisfaction enough.47
Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free?
In general, as long as guys have easy sexual access to attractive women, they feel no need to exert more energy, time or money to get female attention. This is particularly evident on college campuses. The American Council on Education recently reported that campus ratios are now about 57 percent women to 43 percent guys.48 Not incidentally, the number of romantic relationships has drastically decreased and casual sex has greatly increased, with women exhibiting sexual patterns similar to those of young men — of being hunters, not just gatherers.
The Guttentag-Secord theory was first presented by Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord in their 1983 book, Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question. They suggested that members of the sex in smaller supply are less reliant on their partners because many potential relationships are available to them, thus they have more “dyadic power” — the upper hand — over members of the surplus sex. When confronted with an abundance of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous relationship. In societies with too many women, or too few “marriageable” men, fewer people marry, and the ones who do will do so later in life. Since men take advantage of a variety of available partners, women’s traditional roles are devalued, and because these women can’t rely on their partners to stick around, more of them turn to furthering their education or career to support themselves.49
One female college student from our survey reflected this concern:
I think one of the biggest challenges will be the effect this will have on family dynamics. Today’s well-educated, empowered, successful women don’t want lame, slacker husbands, and most men don’t want to feel inferior to their wives. Will this push us into becoming more of an individual, rather than a family-based, society?
“Men are as good as their women require them to be,” said one 27-year-old guy we interviewed. This statement made us wonder about how easy access to sex affects men’s motivation to achieve other life goals. Could there be a spillover from easy sexual access to assuming other goals can also be achieved with only minimal effort and planning? It could be argued that our goals are fueled by evolution and that the majority of our efforts are just part of one big elaborate mating ritual. But in the past, the prize — a sexual partner (and propagating one’s genetics) — would have been the reward for hard work, or at least some wise planning. Today the reward is essentially free and available before any hard work has been done, so what’s left? It’s like downing dessert before dinner.
A young woman Sax interviewed in his book, Girls on the Edge: the Four Factors Driving the New Crisis for Girls, said, “Guys today just don’t know how to satisfy a woman. The guys just want ‘wham, bam, thank-you ma’am.’ They don’t care about building a relationship.” Sax pointed out that because boys and girls are becoming sexually active at an earlier age than in their parent’s generation, boys are more egocentric and less mature, and that there’s been a cultural shift from dating towards “hooking up,” with boys feeling less of an obligation to care about the girls.
The growing influence of porn culture plays some role here as well. Most young men today will tell you that they visit porn sites. Some of them will even enthusiastically describe to you the features of their favorite sites. Given the choice between masturbating over online pornography and going out on a date with a real girl — that is to say, a girl who doesn’t look like a porn star and isn’t wearing lingerie — more and more young men tell me that they prefer online porn. “Girls online are way better looking,” one young man said to me, with no apology or embarrassment.50
High costs of living driving down personal and social values
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.
— Noam Chomsky, linguist and social-political critic
The cost of a gallon of gas, school tuition and a house are now out of proportion for young people in comparison to the Baby Boomer generation that has parented this generation. Because it’s more expensive to live in America now than before the economic slump, many Americans are taking on large amounts of additional debt to
make ends meet. Equity strategist Peter Boockvar says, “The absolute cost of living is now back at a record high, [but America] has 7 million less jobs.”51 Americans generally feel they have more opportunity to get ahead than their parents but are more exposed to economic risk as well, whites being much more uncertain than minorities.52
In 1970, a new house in the U.S. cost $17,000, and the median household income was $8,730. The average yearly tuition of public university was $480; private was $1,980. In 1990, the average cost of a new house increased to $79,100, and the median household income was $29,943. The average yearly tuition of public university was $5,243.53 In 2010, the average cost of a new house was $221,800 and the median household income was $49,445. The average cost of public university was $15,014 (2009-10 academic year).54 Now it costs more to send kids to private elementary school than it used to cost to go to Harvard, Yale or Stanford University.
Has the cost of living caused men to see the idea of family not as the reward of one’s hard work but, rather, as a burden and the cause of having to work hard? To many young men, the future looks bleak, and they wonder how they will ever be able to afford a house, children and retirement. The higher prices of schooling across the board no doubt have had an effect on how men are planning their lives. In addition, in this recession three men have lost their jobs for every woman who has lost hers.55
SOURCE: UNKNOWN
Man’s Math
This amusing equation is all over the Web. Sadly, many young men draw the same conclusion.
Many students who go into serious debt for low-value degrees grasp the realities of employment only upon graduation — that there isn’t a real job awaiting them and their diploma isn’t an assured route for success. A whole generation of young people, who were told they could be anything they put their minds to, are being thrown into a junkyard of mass unemployment, settling for less than their ideal job just to make it. Without the real possibility of ever becoming the family breadwinner, young men are having to deal with feelings of anticipated failure. If they can’t be the alpha guy, what new roles are available for them?
School’s out — now what?
Today, all fingers are pointing toward STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers as guaranteed jobs. The College Board recently stated some sobering statistics:
The World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in the quality of its mathematics and science education. Data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicates that only 11 percent of U.S. students earn science and engineering bachelor degrees, while students in China and the European Union are earning science and engineering degrees at nearly twice that pace. NSF data also indicates that the U.S. ranks 20th out of 24 industrialized countries in the percentage of 24-year-olds who had earned a first degree in the natural sciences or engineering.56
The same idea was emphasized in a recent Casey Daily Research report:
In the 21st century, intellectual capital is what will matter in the job market and will help a country grow its economy. Investments in biosciences, computers and electronics, engineering, and other growing high-tech industries have been the major differentiator in recent decades. More careers than ever now require technical skills so in order to be competitive in those fields, a nation must invest in STEM studies. Economic growth has slowed and unemployment rates have spiked, making employers much pickier about qualifications to hire. There is now an overabundance of liberal arts majors.
A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates (crossed against popularity): clinical psychology, 19.5 percent; miscellaneous fine arts, 16.2 percent; U.S. history, 15.1 percent; library science, 15 percent; and (tied for No. 5) military technologies and educational psychology, 10.9 percent each. Unemployment rates for STEM subjects hovered around 0 to 3 percent: astrophysics/astronomy, around 0 percent; geological and geophysics engineering, 0 percent; physical science, 2.5 percent; geosciences, 3.2 percent; and math/computer science, 3.5 percent.
STEM jobs also pay more. The list of the 20 highest midcareer median salaries, by college degree, features no careers from the liberal arts. Liberal arts degrees provide few prospects for graduates. Yet the bubble continues to inflate. In the 2009–2010 school year, around 690,000 non-U.S. citizens were enrolled at American colleges, the highest level in the world and up 26 percent from a decade ago. Non-U.S. students constitute 2.5 percent of bachelor’s degree students, 10 percent of graduate students, and 33 percent of doctoral candidates, with 18 percent of non-U.S. students enrolled in engineering programs — nearly triple the level of U.S. students.57
Anyone from our survey who selected “Young men in America will not be as innovative or capable as their peers in other First World countries” may have rightly noticed these trends that are a neon sign of the times not to be ignored except at one’s future peril.
Who’s failing whom?
Young men are not failing at school; the school system is failing them. The United States spends more money per pupil than the majority of other developed countries, but it achieves less gain per buck. And now that many schools receive funding based on test results, teachers teach for those outcomes, not for curiosity or critical thinking, nor for learning nonspecific principals or values. Such training to focus on fact memorization lowers the intellectual level of the teachers themselves, not just their bored students.
“The quality of teachers has been declining for decades, and no one wants to talk about it. … We need to find a more powerful means to attract the most promising candidates to the teaching profession,” said Harold O. Levy, chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, in 2000.58 There are a lot of amazing teachers out there, but in general, the current batch of teachers are less intelligent than earlier peers, buried in the bottom third of the SAT class.59 60 IQ is definitely not the sole predictor of good teaching, but the difference between having a strong or weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Kids who have a good teacher in the fourth grade are less likely to become teenage parents, are more likely to go to college and will, on average, earn $50,000 more over a lifetime.61
But because there are few tangible incentives to being a dedicated teacher (poor wages, less status), over time many educators get discouraged and don’t invest the effort to make their classes engaging or relevant to current events. Thus many kids end up just dumbed down by rote memorizing to achieve teacher approval and school-targeted results. Much education is not problem focused or solution oriented, or relevant to real-world challenges, as we believe it should be.
What else is wrong with school dynamics? Too much boring homework; absent parents who are not interested in their kids’ progress or academic problems, only their results; elimination of gym class and structured playtime (no time or place to release pent up energy, socialize at recess or develop imagination); and the ever-tempting option to text and surf the Internet in class, which swamps directed attention at the lesson of the day.
Thirty years ago elementary schools offered recess twice a day. Many schools now have recess only once a day, and some schools are eliminating play or free time altogether. So all that restless energy that young boys have now has nowhere to be released — except in the classroom.
Kindergarten now resembles what used to be a first-grade class. Since boys’ brains develop differently from girls’, they aren’t receptive to the intense reading exercises now given to kindergarteners. If a boy is forced to learn before his brain his ready, he is unintentionally conditioned to dislike the task, and early negative experiences create resistance and resentment for learning in particular and school in general. Since 1980, there has been a 71 percent increase in the number of boys who say they don’t like school, according to a University of Michigan study.62 That dislike is both cause and effect of poor academic performance. We see this in the evidence that the United States ranked No. 25 on international comparative tests. In Finland, which ranked No. 1, children don’t start formal schooling unti
l they’re 7 years old,63 but they are learning much at home from their families.
Since B’s have become the new C’s — it is now unacceptable to be “average” — has the pressure from having to perform turned boys off from trying in the first place? Many guys from our survey said yes. In particular, 64 percent of boys age 12 and younger agreed that “pressure to perform combined with fear of failing causes young men to not bother trying in the first place.”
SAT scores are often seen as a valid predictor of college success.64 But guys’ SAT scores are the worst they’ve been in 40 years. With more and more-diverse test takers than ever before, a decline in scores is somewhat expected. But these scores affected boys of all races and SES (socioeconomic status) levels. So why the regression? Despite the Obama administration describing as fatally flawed the Bush administration’s plan of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it’s still the law of the land, and its test-driven accountability measures are falling short, even if we did not disagree with the premise of teaching to the testing.
“Unfortunately, [NCLB] testing did not translate into improved learning. A Rand Corp. study released last week found that schools did pay more attention to underserved groups, but teaching focused on test prep rather than learning. Schools reduced time for teaching subjects that weren’t tested but are important for training citizens, like social studies,” a San Francisco Chronicle editorial reported in January.65
The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It Page 4
