Pardon me while I buck the trend and note that I see more than a grain of truth in Kay Hymowitz’s column.
While I disagree that enjoying the occasional video game or Michael Bay movie signifies perpetual adolescence (except perhaps in cases where obsession with those things trumps other responsibilities), my experience with other men is one that betrays many of the things that Hymowitz describes in the column– fear of responsibility, obsession with adolescent fantasies, etc.
A lot of the married men I know deeply want to be perpetual adolescents. They openly and repeatedly deride their wives to me (when their wives are safely out of earshot), they describe their own children as terrorists when they cry. They take every opportunity to spend time away from their families and “hang out with the guys” (Frankly, as a man who loves both my wife and my daugther, I’m a little sick of the constant company loyalty tests that drag me out to bars and restaurants at all hours while my wife waits for me with the baby)
These “men” told me every horror story in the book about marriage when I told them I was getting married (“Buy that motorcycle now, because once you’re married it’s all over”). They told me every horror story about parenthood when they found out we were expecting our first child (“Enjoy the pregnancy– it’s your last nine months of freedom as a couple”).
It’s not just the young guys either. An older married “man” who’s working on his first grandchild proudly told me that he had never changed a diaper in his life, in spite of having multiple children. Wow. Good for you! You managed to dodge part of fatherhood!
I can’t help but wonder why these men got married or had kids, since they obviously revile both their marriages and their progeny so much. But they are older than I am, so they come from a time when things were actually expected of them.
There are doubtless as many reasons why men stay single as there are men who stay single. But I think to pooh-pooh the obvious cultural trend toward the men-as-large-children-who-can-drink-and-buy-porn paradigm is just silly. I see it everywhere almost every day. Based on my admittedly anecdotal experience, the phenomenon that Hymowitz describes isn’t new, it just isn’t held in check anymore.
It’s not the video games, or the action movies, or even the smutty magazines. It’s the pursuit of those things at the expense of responsibilities classically associated with manhood that defines the adolescent.
