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

by Philip G. Zimbardo

  The girl we spoke with didn’t know about this strategy when he asked her the question. “Of course not!” She was flustered and caught off-guard. “This guy has no tact,” she thought to herself. But he had a formula. And the formula worked, sort of. They ended up making out at the end of the night, but the chemistry was fleeting. Perhaps she just had buyer’s remorse and his game needed work, but her attraction to him quickly waned when they moved beyond the script into the world of genuine human connection.

  Many books like The Mystery Method and The Game have emerged lately, offering some very effective, sometimes offensive, and generally entertaining advice on how to pick up women. It is admirable that guys would go to such elaborate lengths just to get their foot in the door, but unfortunately, their solutions don’t address other key areas of a relationship, such as finding areas of mutual interest, transitioning from stranger to interested date or becoming a long-term mate. Maybe tackling these other areas is not the point, but at some point, when a guy does want a real relationship with a girl, it can be difficult to transition out of the “game” into creating the relationship. Their whole mindset has to change from approaching the girl or woman as a “target” of possible conquest to being with a “person” of potential value and interest.

  The key is staying mindful. When you snuff out the spontaneity of connecting with someone from the opposite sex, the motivation transforms from meeting an interesting girl to bedding “10s.” It goes from building self-confidence to peacocking. It’s not even about connecting anymore; it’s about escalating the game in order to score. Other people involved become interchangeable objects for one’s pleasure as the game takes on a new identity more like fantasy football than fantasies about making love with a real-life, flesh-and-blood woman.

  Since the joy of romantic connection doesn’t lie in prefabricated interaction, what do guys who use these methods really want? In the world of young men, the desire for happiness and fulfillment has somehow morphed into the need for stimulation, amusement and control.

  Tucker Max, best-selling author of I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell and Assholes Finish First, posted a dating application online that received many responses. His multiple-choice form asked potential dates questions such as, “What will my friends say when they see you?” Below are some of the options responders could choose for that question:

  “Another tall, hot blonde with no self-esteem — he’s getting laid tonight.”

  “Tonight’s forecast calls for scattered clothes, with a significant chance of intense, passionate humping.”

  “My Lord — she smells like the fish market.”

  “Well, she’s too ugly for him to date … $10 says he sleeps with her anyway.”

  “I wouldn’t call her fat, but he’s gonna need the Jaws of Life to get out of this.”

  “She’s just a cheap hooker. I wonder how much smack she cost him.”

  “Should have been a blow job.”102

  On one level, it’s a joke. But it makes you wonder why Max’s writing turned into a No. 1 New York Times bestselling book while many people are embarrassed to buy condoms or don’t know how to have an honest conversation about sex.

  We see sex everywhere, so why is it so hard to talk about? Is being crude — thus lowbrow and easily dismissible — the only way to make it acceptable? A lot of men in America have developed a madonna-whore complex in part because of this strange divergence. Described as love without sex and sex without love, these men want a wholesome woman as their mate and a whorish woman as their lover. When they come across a woman in the real world that is nice and sexual, they are confused and often push her away — they don’t want sex unless it’s impersonal. This creates hugely challenging intimacy problems for everyone involved.

  Relationships used to be viewed as a precursor to setting up a family together, and people treated their potential partners as such. But today, with fewer reasons to become romantically committed, young men don’t need to look beyond women as sex objects.

  Dynamics of video games

  I’ve fallen in love again, head over heels. Step aside, Crysis: Your sequel is just as bubbly and stunning as you once were in 2007. You were amazing, but this latest model with the new streamlined features is just downright beautiful.

  — Chris Fong, games writer103

  ISTOCKPHOTO

  Like sex, games have been around forever. Like porn, video games entered mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. It was then that arcade games and the first gaming consoles were introduced. The availability of computers, the Internet, touch screens and motion control revolutionized the way people were able to play.

  There are a lot of benefits to playing video games — mainly, they are a lot of fun, and there can be a lot of social bonding, problem solving, strategy and even exercise involved. Online games also provide the opportunity to become more computer literate, a skill that should not be underestimated in the future job market. A lot of online games also allow people to interact with other people around the world, providing an opportunity to learn about many other cultures. But these benefits extend only to a point, and a lot of people don’t take advantage of these positive features.

  As we mentioned before, we’re mostly concerned about people who play video games excessively and in isolation. In a recent AskMen survey, when asked, “Who do you play video games with most often,” only 24 percent of respondents said they play with their friends in person, while 37 percent said they play either completely alone or with strangers online.104

  The disadvantage of playing video games, especially a lot of exciting video games, is that it can make other people and real life seem boring and not worthwhile in comparison. Not surprisingly, compared with teenagers who don’t play video games, adolescent gamers spend about 30 percent less time reading and 34 percent less time doing homework.105 Video gaming is also associated with decreased school performance, and desensitization to violence, and can influence how one learns and socializes due to a lack of balance between time spent playing and engaging in other activities.106

  Going back to Boys Adrift, Sax points out that video games actually can affect the brain in ways that compromise motivation. The nucleus accumbens operates in conjunction with another area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); the nucleus accumbens is responsible for directing drive and motivation, and the DLPFC provides context for that drive:

  A recent brain imaging study of boys between the ages of seven and fourteen years found that playing video games puts this system seriously out of kilter. It seems to shut off blood flow to the DLPFC. … Playing these games engorges the nucleus accumbens with blood, while diverting blood away from the balancing area of the brain. The net result is that playing video games gives boys the reward associated with achieving a great objective, but without any connection to the real world, without any sense of a need to contextualize the story.107

  When video games go wrong

  Few things unite people like a common enemy. In the past, a common enemy might have been a neighboring tribe or country, but a gamer’s enemy is social obligation: responsibilities, time management, dealing with real people and taking real risks.

  Video games go wrong when people play alone for long periods of time on a regular basis. A couple of grown men loaned their perspectives in our survey:

  I believe myself to be a member of the first generation of Internet gamers, and I used to be a hard-core MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) addict spending 12 to 16 hours a day playing games. So I will share some personal thoughts. It started with bulletin board systems online, where you could play simple games and leave messages to other people, and gradually progressed into online chat rooms and then interactive games with chat rooms and now into online societies where you can literally spend all of your daylight hours inside and there will be people there wanting to play and chat with you. This alternative to spending time with people in the physical world around them offers easier access to
gratification of social needs. The direct consequence of this is a degeneration of one’s ability to socialize in person. Especially when it comes to new people and women. We have nothing of interest to talk about. No one wants to hear about our characters or things that happened during an online battle, or how we have designed our online house. And so we are left behind others who are not as interested in online gaming. Another horrible side effect is poor physical health. Many gamers (when I say gamers, I am referring to ones I know and have met) have underdeveloped upper-body muscles and poor eating habits and health as a direct consequence of the time spent behind a computer. Once you find yourself addicted to the Internet, it feels pointless to change your habits, because you get no gratification for doing so. If you manage to break away from the computer screen, you will not know what to do with the time you normally spend playing. There are no tools available online that I have found to offer a path to freedom from this kind of addiction. I believe the best solution is prevention, and the only way to do that is to inspire children.

  I am a physician with a research background in neuroscience, who battled his own addictions with video games. I was an addicted gamer who, at my peak, invested over 20,000 hours of playing games over a period of nine years. My reckless compulsion to play games transformed me into a monster that almost destroyed my family, marriage and career. Without attention to this quickest-growing addiction, our society will suffer from the creation of Generation Vidiot, millions of people devoid of innovation and skills to live in the physical world.

  Video games also go wrong when the person playing them is desensitized to reality and real-life interactions with others. Many would agree that violence in video games is synonymous with success.108 Children with more propensities to be aggressive are more attracted to violent video media, but violent media, in turn, can also make them more aggressive. This could be related to the fact that most video games reward players for violent acts, often permitting them to move to the next level in a game. Yet recent research suggests a link between violent video games and real-life aggression — given the opportunity, both adults and children were more aggressive after playing violent games. And people who identify themselves with violent perpetrators in video games are able to take aggressive action while playing that role, reinforcing aggressive behavior.109

  Preparing for cyberwar

  More and more, violent video games are having practical applications. For example, realistic violent video games set in a warlike environment are being used to treat veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Video game–like applications of digital technology are also an integral part of military operation. P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War, raises some considerations:

  Technology is wrapped up in the story of war. You look at all the things that surround us, everything from the Internet to jet engines; these are all things where the military has been a driver for technology. And technology opens new frontiers, new directions we can go in, but it also creates new dilemmas, new questions you need to answer. … Going to war meant that you were going to a place where there was such a danger that you might never come home again, you might never see your family again. Now compare that experience to that of a Predator drone pilot. You’re sitting behind a computer screen, you’re shooting missiles at enemy targets, you’re killing enemy combatants. And then at the end of the day, you get back in your car, and 20 minutes later, you’re at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.110

  Singer alludes to important questions. How will identifying with a violent avatar, or removing oneself from direct violent action that’s actually happening in the real world, affect the way we view each other and affect our real-life behavior? Could video games desensitize players not only to others’ feelings but also to their own?

  Rye Barcott, author of It Happened on the Way to War,111 told us in an interview that “in the Marine battalion in Iraq in 2005, during heavy firefight periods, young Marines returning to barracks would rush to play violent video games all night, going back into battle the next day like ‘exhausted zombies,’ and that was a common pattern among many of them.”

  “Video games are never going to replicate the real thing,” says Maj. Larry F. Dillard Jr., U.S. Army.112 But you never know.

  In the popular children’s science fiction novel Ender’s Game, Ender gets enrolled into Battle School, eventually reaching the school’s top rank through his intelligence and cunning. Ender’s practice sessions, in which he commands spaceships in a 3-D battle simulator with his fellow students, gradually escalate into battle after battle against an enemy alien race known as the Formics, aka Buggers. Ender is on the brink of exhaustion and is having horrible nightmares that haunt him during his waking hours. In his “final exam,” Ender’s crew is outnumbered nearly a thousand to one near a small planet. Ender decides to use a deadly weapon to destroy the planet itself, annihilating all the ships in orbit. He’s hoping his ruthless actions will get him kicked out of the school. Instead, he learns that all the battles had taken place with real fleets and his actions effectively ended the war with the aliens.

  The questions foremost in our minds are: Could Ender have killed the Buggers if he knew that it wasn’t a game? If being one step removed from action makes for more-effective and less-endangered soldiers, why wouldn’t the military be moving in this direction?

  Not to mention how obsessed young people, especially guys, are with gaming. “Look, the military understands that if it can’t embrace today’s digital youth, they are never going to recruit the kind of soldiers and the kind of airmen and the kind of Marines that they need to have for the next century,” says Noah Shachtman, contributing editor of Wired.113 But will the youth of today understand the impact of their actions as they use indirect technology to execute their orders? Soldiers using this technology today may have had first-hand experience in real combat situations, and they come to work wearing their uniforms as a constant reminder that the button they press in America has real-life consequences overseas. We are wary that kids who are growing up immersed in realistic digital entertainment will not have the same capacity to empathize with other people and may make less-humane decisions.

  When video games go right

  There’s a reason why video games are so popular — they make challenges fun and interesting. When video games go right, they provide a stimulating environment for triumph and offer some social bonding. Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life are very social, even if players are in the guise of an avatar. Positive gaming may also take the form of a learning or training program and make real-world impacts.

  Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil was a step in the right direction. With the mantra “Play it — before you live it,” more than 1,500 players started visualizing and living their lives as if there were a true oil crisis. The result, as described on the website, was an “eerily plausible collective imagining of such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening. … More than mere ‘raising awareness.’ World Without Oil made the issues real, and this in turn led to real engagement and real change in people’s lives.” Visit worldwithoutoil.org to learn more.

  Foldit is another game that is making waves. Users solve puzzles for science by designing proteins. It turns out that humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities are more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks, so the scientists behind Foldit are using players’ answers to teach computers to fold proteins faster and predict protein structures. The combined effort of players actually helped solve a problem related to HIV that had puzzled scientists for more than 10 years. Check out http://fold.it for more information.

  The Nintendo Wii gaming system is another great example of positive gaming. Wii has a broader demographic than other gaming consoles and typically involves more exercise and socializing, too. The whole family can play together, but the games are fun enough that teenage guys play
by themselves or with each other. Nikita has even seen 90-year-old grandmothers playing Wii Bowling in a senior home. It’s one of those “kid-tested, parent-approved” kind of things that creates a win-win scenario. One-fifth of 16- to 24-year-olds said they’d give up their gym membership if they played Wii regularly, and parents believe that social gaming platforms like the Wii are having a positive influence in their home in addition to encouraging kids to do more exercise, reported a recent TNS Technology study.114

  Billy is in his room

  The scene: Visiting relatives are welcomed by their cousins, whom they have not seen for some time. After the hugs and kisses and gift giving, the teenage son of the host family disappears — and never returns, even to say goodbye. The relatives ask, “Where’s Billy?” His mom answers with what has become a familiar family refrain: “Billy is in his room.” That is the explanation for the failure to respect minimal social graces, or what used to be accepted as minimal family obligations to come out from seclusion to even say, “See ya, Cuz” and buzz back to his video dungeon. For anyone who values family and its rituals, this is unacceptable behavior not only from Billy but even more so from mom and pop, who should know better and not be covering up for their son’s lack of civility. In one sense, as such scenes get replicated widely, such behavior becomes part of the negative fallout from excessive, isolated video game playing and porn absorption.

  The rise of gals

  More and more women are finding that, although it may not necessarily be what they want, they don’t have to have a man in their life to achieve many of their personal, social and romantic goals.