One of the things that constantly seems to surprise women of a certain age is the hostility that that young men in their 20s and 30s have to political correctness and feminism.
When these women observers were young, in the 1970s, men were either in Alan Alda’s camp or gave lip service to radical feminism. Now, they can’t be bothered. They’ve heard the lectures their whole lives. So they just shrug. Among their friends, they might crack a few a jokes. But they no longer buy the program.
Add to that men are delaying marriage–much to the frustration of young women whose biological clock is ticking–and you have the makings of another magazine-style “social crisis.” Men are behaving badly. Or to put it bluntly: single men are not doing what single women want.
Strangely, this time around the writer lamenting the “social crisis” of male misbehavior is the normally serious Kay S. Hymowitz, a writer for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal magazine.
Here is a representative sample of her scolding analysis: “History suggests an uncomfortable fact about the new SYM [Single Young Male]: he’s immature because he can be. We can argue endlessly about whether ‘masculinity’ is natural or constructed—whether men are innately promiscuous, restless, and slobby, or socialized to be that way—but there’s no denying the lesson of today’s media marketplace: give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile,” writes Hymowitz in the City Journal, a quarterly published by the Manhattan Institute.
The article is packed with references to magazines that single men read, television shows they watch, and video games they play. What is lacking is any kind of serious analysis–lad mags, risque tv and violent games (by themselves) don’t prove anything. Hymowitz does not present any evidence that this low-class content is representative. She cites no Nielsen or Simmons data.
The one time she cites real data, it is fascinating:
“Consider: in 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006—a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period. That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives, and child-care bills.”
She doesn’t really examine why so many young men choose to put off “mortgages, wives, and child-care bills.” It is an important social problem, as this discussion at The Atlantic indicates. The next generation will almost certainly be smaller, children will grow up with dramatically older parents and so on. That puts the U.S. on the same path as Europe.
Hymowitz doesn’t tell us why; she only explains what she believes the stereotypical young male does with his time instead.
When she does attempt an explanation, it is very feeble. Men have been revolting against the bourgeois order since the early 19th century. Oh? How does that explain that marriage rates were high among twenty-somethings until the late 1960s and began to suddenly and severely drop thereafter.
One thing that Hymowitz might want to consider is that women have changed, due to feminism. The male behavior she deplores is simply a response.
A few years ago, a woman I knew from college complained to me about men. After the usual Hymowitz-like rant, she cited a man in particular who she thought was perfect for her. At 38, he had just made partner at his law firm, their families knew each other for generations and so on. I pointed out to her that he pursued her repeatedly in college–and she had rejected him then. Instead, she dated older men with money.
Well, she said, I would take him now.
I am sure you would, I said. But he is now doing what your ex-boyfriends did and dating women in the their early 20s.
It isn’t fair, she said.
Actually, it is–it is just not good for society.
Richard Miniter.com
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19 Comments
gcblues:good for society? who cares? people have the absolute moral imperative to please themselves. review ayn rand’s 57 interview with mike wallace for fleshing out the obvious.
Jan 29, 2008 - 9:02 am Teplost:as a 53 yr old expat business
man retired, i have become an absolute racist with cause. i would never ever have relations again with an american white woman. i do not care how they “feel”. hell, i do not care how i “feel” either. life is for living, their whining self absobtion is ugly, stiffling and useless. i do not care to require permission to live, gracias adios. with such a short time on this earth, who wants to be bogged down with the unimportant drivel of these sad excuses for humanity. gosh gc, how do you really “feel”
I have a 22 year old son, and what you say is true, right down to the battling cyborgs and models (I don’t know about the exploding toilets). But I’ve noticed something else too, the return of an almost romantic sense of honor, a deep regard for personal manly courage, and a protectiveness of and regard for women. I have also noticed that the young women who are his peers have a real appreciation for these young men. The strident contempt for men that characterized what passed for feminism seems to have faded. Maybe marriages won’t be delayed so long after all, and maybe this generation of young people will be real partners in marriage.
Jan 29, 2008 - 10:00 am Drugstore Cowgirl:Too funny. You reap what you sow.
Jan 30, 2008 - 9:24 am dan:As Miniter points out, feminists can shut it: we’ve heard this crap since we were 10 years old. You can’t please women in bed, you aren’t sensitive enough, you are part of an oppressive class, you aren’t mature enough (don’t you know women are always more mature than men?), yadda yadda yadda.
Well, I guess we just suck. Even if we’re 14 years old.
Ah… but now the women our age are 30 or older, and damn if they don’t want to get married. Like yesterday. Well, ladies, I guess you should’ve thought about that before you put us all through the psycho-emotional ringer these past 20 years, because now you mostly just look like egotistical Bitches to us. Why would we want to marry you - especially when you can leave us when you like and take half our crap?
Women will complain that it isn’t so, we’re overreacting, or we’re just like say we are. Well ladies, maybe it’s time to consider whether, Nope, you’re just being bitches.
Jan 30, 2008 - 9:42 am Wayne:My oldest son is 21 and in college. What Teplost said!
Jan 30, 2008 - 9:49 am huxley:Yesterday I heard Hymowitz on NPR expounding on this theme. There she did have an explanation for why men got with the marriage program in the recent past: social pressure.
For better and worse, most social pressure is gone these days, including the pressure to get married and the pressure to stay married. Most men have noticed marriage is a crap shoot skewed in its penalties against men, and that women are twice as likely to file for divorce. If women are upset that men are reluctant to marry, women might want to consider their willingness to end marriage and penalize their ex-husbands.
Teplost & Wayne — I hope your impressions are part of a larger trend.
Jan 30, 2008 - 2:08 pm El Chauvinisto:The problem with feminism is that at it’s radical incepetion (~1960’s) they preached “individualism.” The, “we don’t need men” mentality.
And what dan said above is right on.
Why would men, who are facing courts that don’t appreciate the father, princess syndrome women, and an ultra PC society, ever risk throwing away his reputation as well as “half our crap?” It doesn’t make sense.
Feminism has made its bed and now so it must lie in it.
Repeal the 19th Amendment!
Feminism is a mental disorder.
MenAreBetterThanWomen.com
Jan 30, 2008 - 2:21 pm A. N. Pierson:Dear Mr. Miniter,
I watched many times when you predicted the imminent demise of John McCain. Now he seems to be the clear frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Isn’t it time you addressed this and explained why you got this so wrong?
Jan 30, 2008 - 5:44 pm Tony:Good article - needed to be said.
Perhaps if the feminists had worked out that being an obnoxious opinioned man-hater was not the same thing as being a strong woman they may have done less damage to themselves. Enjoy a sad lonely old age ladies, you’ve earned it.
Jan 30, 2008 - 5:49 pm gordo:You want to know why I like dating European women, because they never bought into this feminist crap. They expect a man to be a man, they don’t dig for gold, and they are relaxed and fun to be with. Many American women are uptight, possibly as one legacy of the feminist movement. If I was a young man I wouldn’t get married early on - too much risk, and I don’t care what anyone says - the courts are skewed towards women. I would find a nice, no hassle concubine - less risk and less bs.
Jan 30, 2008 - 6:07 pm McGarnagle:Haha, you know who is being the bitches? you guys. I’m a 24 y/o male, unmarried, but with a long term girlfriend. You know why I don’t get married? Not because some feminist bull dyke browbeat me at 10, creating some deep-seated pop-Freudian trauma that can only be healed through video games and an extended adolescence. Instead, it is the social acceptance of serial monogamy combined with the comparative paucity of stable well-paying jobs. I think for men to assume this victimization complex by some sort of shadowy cabal of feminists is pretty ridiculous, and the schadenfreude directed at women over 30 who aren’t married is pretty despicable. Some pretty basic sociological trends explain why marriage is disincentivized for men, and combined with the very real idea that women who want children have a fairly short window to do so, makes their concern legitimate. Anyway, I think you fellas need to buck up and get a date, and not blame Camile Paglia for your lonely Saturday nights.
Jan 30, 2008 - 6:17 pm Grizzly Recare:What’s that famous expression?? Oh yea,I remember. “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle”. Seems to me that it takes 2 to play that game. It’s unfortunate that many women my age who grew up after the late 60’s are narcissistic, hateful, controlling, incredibly insecure and just painful to be around.
Sorry Ladies, you made your bed. I’m now very successful and more than happy to purchase a little affection now and then… I have absolutely no interest in listening to you whine and bitch.
Jan 30, 2008 - 7:44 pm OmegaPaladin:McGarn,
Where are you getting the whine here? This is basically a counterclaim to the idea that men are somehow defective for not wanting to get married. The social climate doesn’t favor marriage - no conspiracy required. This was partly an unintentional byproduct of the feminist movement
This is not a group of people who can’t get a woman, its a group who are not choosing to look for marriage.
Jan 31, 2008 - 1:27 am mcgarnagle:Omega,
I realize my first comment was pretty dismissive and glib, but I fired it off really quickly after getting pretty frustrated by the article and the comments. I’ll try and flesh it out.
The original claim that feminism is at least partially responsible for young mens’ refusal to marry is a total non sequitur. The author asserts that women have somehow changed since the 60s, and cites his friend as evidence of this. As far as I can tell, their is nothing about her situation that sounds feminist, if anything, its regressive to a fault. To put it overly crass, when she was young, she exchanged her atrractiveness for material security and social status, and is now frustrated when she sees that transaction from the other side. Perhaps its not admirable, but understandable for all parties, and its a situation that’s hardly uncommon. From Chaucer to Austen, the idea that a woman has a limited window of fertility and attractiveness, and the anxiety that that induces, has been around. So I so no reason to blame feminism for either this particular situation or the broader trend identified.
Jan 31, 2008 - 11:11 am Grizzly Recare:Combine this with some of the comments (Drugstore Cowgirl, Dan, El Chauv, Grizz, for example), and this whole thread strikes me as an excuse to exhume some deep-seated animosity and engage in a little petty misogyny.
Hello mcgarnagle,
I have 3 questions for you:
1. How old are you?
2. What gender are you?
3. Did you actually read the article written by Kay Hymowitz referenced above?
The Hymowitz article is a 4500+ word screed regarding the evils of males.
I can virtually guarantee you that this woman is a product of the 60’s feminist movement and is a very unpleasant person to be around. Please explain to me how avoiding females of this type makes me a misogynist.
Jan 31, 2008 - 12:19 pm McGarnagle:Grizz,
Like I said above, I’m a 24 y/o male. In fact, the second paragraph is a surprisingly accurate depiction of my life, right city even, although I wish I were making 60k. I actually agree that its a profoundly stupid original article. It just brings up every popular “guy thing” of the past couple years as evidence for this supposed crisis. I actually came across this post looking for some discussion of the article since its making its way around my friends.
My problem is with everyones knee-jerk response to blame feminists. Hymowitz actually gives a little credence to this argument in her essay, but it strikes me as really facile. If anything, feminists have failed in indoctrinating women to only accept Alan Alda-type guys because Tucker Max and his ilk wouldn’t have many stories to tell if girls didn’t like, or at least tolerate, people like him.
Jan 31, 2008 - 1:20 pm huxley:The withholding of love, or at least sex, can have a profoundly civilizing effect on a lot of men, see Andreas Capellanus and all of courtly love literature for evidence. Women are clearly not withhold their love from these a lot of these loutish guys, so they must not all be harsh feminists. Again, like I said originally, its the social acceptance of serial monogamy, combined with effective birth control, that allows for this. That, combined with the reletivley short window of female fertility inspires anxiety in women, of which the original article is an expression. I actually don’t agree with Hymowitz, but the anger directed at feminists strikes me as really bizarre.
For the record, Kay Hymowitz is not a sixties-style feminist. She is a contributing editor to City Journal, a center-right publication where the original article Miniter references appeared. She is concerned about education and children.
I believe that Hymowitz is correct in pointing to a significant disconnect between the sexes that bodes ill for our society. However, blaming it entirely on young men and characterizing them cartoonishly, as Hymowitz does, makes things worse. Recognizing the issues men face in marriage and honoring them for the role they play in families and in society would, IMO, be more to the point in healing the gender divide and strengthening the American family.
Jan 31, 2008 - 2:18 pm joeblough:The fact is that young men are not being offered a particularly good deal in marriage, or at least don’t think they are.
On the contrary. Marriage is looking like a very questionable deal at best.
And that’s the inescapable meaning of those statistics.
===========
Say what we may about the discontents of old-fashioned conventional roles in marriage, the numbers seem to indicate that they offered a more attractive or at least workable deal to all concerned.
As I understand it, the basic matter was that the stresses and irritations of providing for and being tied to a single woman and her children, were counterbalanced to some extent by personal authority and a certain deference from one’s dependents, not to mention domestic comforts provided by that woman.
Not to mention the fact that sex was harder to come by outside of marriage.
Now?
In marriage a young fellow makes himself vulnerable to lawsuits and the virtual slavery of alimony and child support in a hostile court environment, in return for what?
Not enough it seems.
And more importantly not enough that he can only get from marriage and not without it.
Young men particularly really are somewhat wilder, more focused on living in the moment and less interested in nesting than women.
So if they don’t have to marry to find sex, and if marriage is more a threat to their well being and peace of mind than the single life, and that without sufficient valuable attractive compensations, why would they marry?
What would the benefit be? Fatherhood? Domesticity? The constant companionship of a woman? At the age of 25? I don’t think so.
==============
And again, there is something dark at play.
Young men have just watched 2 present generations live though a wave of divorces and the chaos and pain that resulted. And everybody who has paid any attention at all knows that the courts are hostile to men, especially when there are children involved.
Young men are not necessarily stupid.
So in marriage:
No special authority
No domestic service
No deference
A better chance of sex.
And a reasonable likelihood of abandonment and 20 years of financial burden and emotional pain — just like dad.
Without marriage:
No special authority
No domestic service
No deference
A lesser chance of sex.
But without the likelihood of the pain he watched is dad, uncle, or dad’s friend live through.
Sure there’s good old romance.
But really. Which looks like the better deal to you?
Feb 1, 2008 - 3:30 am joeblough:And I’ll add that we are seeing the results of a general failure of imagination.
The biggest mistake we make was letting the gov’t get involved — and thus used the armed force of the state to enforce the ideas of the feminists.
Whether the feminist’s ideas were good or bad, left to our own devices we would have gotten it sorted out.
The better ideas would have been accommodated somehow and the stupid ones forgotten, or banished to the margins of society.
But with the guns of the state FORCING people to adopt the feminist program with quotas for hiring and all the rest of the crap … well doing a delicate and humane job of sorting out the confusion was off the table.
=========
It was all pretty basic, if challenging.
The technological advantages developed over the 20th century freed women from endless hours of drudgery.
And awareness grew of women as reasoning individuals with rights as such.
So the society was faced with a huge question.
What to do with all this newly available human energy that was just and appropriate.
We blew it.
Feb 1, 2008 - 4:06 am