Manning Up

January 31, 2011
What do Adam Sandler movies, Maxim magazine, and South Park have in common? According to journalist Hymowitz's unpersuasive polemic, they are compelling evidence that "crudity is at the heart of the child-man persona," an increasingly ubiquitous personality type among men age 20–40 who don't grow up because they don't have to. Weaving together the socioeconomic and cultural paradigm shifts of the last half-century, Hymowitz identifies the appearance of "a new stage of life" in developed societies—pre-adulthood—where the traditional life-script: grow up, marry, have children, and die, is now: "What do I want to do with my life?" But in a world where social demands no longer equate manhood with maturity, frat dudes, nerds, geeks, and emo-boys can remain in suspended postadolescence, while women, whose biological clocks are ticking, are forced to choose between single parenthood and casting their lot with a "child-man." It's a provocative argument that Hymowitz advances with considerable spirit, but she conflates character with maturity, and her blaming feminism for the infantilization of men wrests more power and control away from men, suggesting that they can't develop a sense of responsibility without a woman's help.

January 1, 2011

City Journal contributing editor Hymowitz (Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age, 2007, etc.) examines how the career-first trend among young Americans has led to social and economic gains for women and a destabilization of gender roles for men.

In this witty book, the author argues that the shift toward an information-driven economy that began in the 1990s has created a major demographic event she calls "preadulthood." The author describes this new stage of life as "a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance." Preadulthood usually begins in college, where more women than men now earn four-year degrees. From their early 20s to early 30s, these young people often wander "from job to job...city to city, country to country" as they attempt to determine what they want to do with their lives. When they settle into a stable work life, it is typically in a knowledge-based profession. Many of these jobs—especially those in teaching, communications and health care—are dominated by women brought up with the idea that "[c]areer and independence [are] required. Love, marriage, husbands, and children entirely optional." Confronted with the rise of the "alpha female" and pop-culture icons who often glorify adult male childishness, many men go into a state of slovenly "arrested development." Sex, beer, and video games become the focal points of goalless lives that can extend into early midlife and even beyond. No such laxity exists for professional women, whose lives have the added constraint of a relentless biological clock. Hymowitz neither critiques feminism nor apologizes for modern male behavior. Rather, she offers enlightened observations to help women and men—who still say they want careers and families—make sense of cultural paradigms no longer based on the traditional life-scripts that once delineated gender roles. Women must come to better terms with their biology and hold males to greater account, while men must dispense with the self-destructive "navel-gazing" and "man up."

A witty and insightful cultural analysis.

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