Rise Of The Man Child
Kay Hymowitz has written a book called Manning Up: How The Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys. The book appears very tantalizing and is sure to ruffle more than a few feathers. I found it really interesting that Pamela Paul, author of such articles as “Are Fathers Necessary?”, said of the book, “With spot-on detail and zero dogma, Kay Hymowitz has written a smart, incisive analysis of the woes troubling today’s young men, oft saddled with the dreary label, ‘adultescents.’ Anyone interested in the state of the sexes will want to read Hymowitz’s wise, accessible and compassionate take.”
You can buy the book by going here:
Jack Donovan is pretty one sided on these issues and his associations (he is a frequent contributor to the fascist website Alternative Right) are creepier than hell, to put it mildly. Unfortunately, he is one of the only intelligent men piercing this issue now, which ironically seems to have more prominent women writing about it than men. I guess that alone illustrates the validity of the argument that men have become “man children.”
Despite associating fairly strongly with down the line reactionaries, Donovan himself isn’t a reactionary, and after talking with him, seems more like he’ll go wherever his writing on masculinity will be published. His book Blood Brothers uses evidence ranging from Uganda to China, where male ritual cutting took place independent of each another, to evidence that men are, as Jack Safran put it in a review, “natural cutters.” I’ve read significant portions of his writing and haven’t found much race hatred, and I like to think I have a keen eye for these things.
Here’s an excerpt of his review of Hymowitz’s book, which you can read fully at The Spearhead:
Kay Hymowitz’s piece for the Wall Street Journal, titled “Where Have The Good Men Gone?” drew a lot of criticism from men and women alike. It’s old news now, but I just got around to reading her book Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.
With either help or direction from her publishers, Hymowitz baited readers with a yellow op-ed, insulting cover art and a goading thesis. At least Micheal Kimmel deigned to call his frat-boy scapegoats “guys.” Hymowitz refers to those guys as “child-men” and the book cover shows a baby dressed as a man. It was a sensationalistic and trashy move, but we live in a sensationalistic, trashy culture.The real problem is that this belittling pitch detracted from the more measured — and often sympathetic — tone of the book itself.
Hymowitz knows that the 20-something, Gen-Y guys she is talking about aren’t children. Her argument is that they are stuck in an extended adolescence — what she calls “preadulthood” — that was a necessary byproduct of the knowledge economy.
My paternal grandfather never graduated from high school. He went straight to work. After spending WWII in the Navy, he ended up working for the Pennsylvania Railroad, and stayed on there until he retired.
Jobs like that are few and far between these days. Kids raised in the 80s, 90s and aughts were raised to go to college and “find themselves” in some fulfilling career, working with their heads instead of their backs. The stable lunch pail jobs were often outsourced, and replaced with job growth in more creative, exciting jobs.
These jobs require education and many offer no linear career path, so if young people want to be “fulfilled” by their careers, they often have to put off getting married and having children. This is true of males and females alike, and while Hymowitz makes much of the “New Girl Order,” she acknowledges that those successful girls are also stuck in a kind of pre-adulthood, too. However, they hear their biological clocks ticking, and they are up against a pressure to get things underway that simply isn’t as pressing for males.
Building off of what Jack wrote, I have on my piano a framed portrait of my own grandfather, who was in the Merchant Marines. While the military is certainly still around as an option, it has been broken and marred in its image by conflicts that don’t have public confidence. When he died, his wife (my grandmother) married a man who owned and operating used car shops. The market for that has been wounded considerably and many who were in that trade are now back in school prepping for the aforementioned “knowledge industry.”
Building of Hymowitz’s argument, the rise of a knowledge industry and of women may be a recipe for extended male adolescence. For literally millenia, manhood has been defined by doing things - providing and protecting your family and community, building and fixing things, etc. What happens when there’s no longer things for men to do?