31 years old, never married, would love to, would love children. But I second the emotion concerning the availability of appropriate mates. I also agree with the perpetual adolescence theme generally, but that’s hardly limited to men, or men of this generation. How many actual human beings do you know, exactly, Ms. H?
The fact is, the previous generation, my dear incompetent parents included, were the pioneers of the perpetual adolescent – and yet, such cultural norms as previously existed decay only slowly, unequally, and leave behind their traces, not least because those norms reflected deep, enduring human needs from which no fashion can permanently distract us.
Women may have their complaints, but the primary problem men have, beyond the legal system, is the behavior of women.
Women shop; they party; they come to new relationships having had abortions (which, it goes without saying, is not supposed to put us off); they indulge in idiot magazines and regale you with astrological predictions, relationship quizzes, diet fads; they are in perpetual motion, and regard any apparent immobility of their mates as laziness, to which their mental whip must be relentlessly applied; they conspire with their friends; they carry on infatuations with their cell phones; they enforce some odd antagonistic Kafkaesque intergender legal code; they try to prey on the alpha males their propositions suggest they despise, and they prey on the more sensitive men who are already disposed to treat them like princesses. Outside the initial flirtation and conquest, they seem at least as likely to regard their mate as an impediment to their sexual happiness as the symbolic male oppressor ever did. They employ all manner of idiot explanations like “but my father was so indifferent to me,” even if you know their father was just some insurance company middle manager whose cruelties consisted of not providing her with all her ridiculous requests.
Biologically speaking, women and their words are a flock of birds, or a wheeling herd of wildebeasts; we are children. But the resort to Darwinian explanations is disingenuous if it is not also presumed that nature made us plenty compatible in proportion to our need to be together and procreate. Forgive me for assuming there never was a time in which, except for certain unsuccessful and shortlived societies, a culture in which men and women were not presumed to spend entire lifetimes together.
But the revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, whose fruit we are, attempted to insert a historical period (.), and apparently it’s largely succeeded, since its students and participants were themselves ignorant 18 year olds at the time. But the real tearing-down applied only to women – that is to say, men did not successfully tear down their own expectations as to the romantic trajectory of their lives. So, women are free to exaggerate out of all proportion with almost any aspect of reality the expectations they have of men. They have even less inner discipline than men, because men at least have all these busy, bitc*y, silly women to constantly remind us of our inadequacies and duties. Everything about the popular culture flatters women; nothing of their proclivities, from extraordinarily expensive and useless baubles to ice hockey, is denied them. There are no limits. And so it should be no surprise that they act as much as possible as though this were so.
But of course it is not so. And there is, we are told, a biological drive to create babies – “their” babies, I might add. The longer I live the more I think that hallowed female solicitude for their children is really just the fulfillment of their surfeit of ego: that is, the children are a part of them, are them.
And while we’re on this tack, let’s observe a fact that all internet pornography demonstrates beyond doubt: women are born to breed as soon as they manifest sexual features. Who has not walked through an American mall in the past 10 years and been surrounded by little budding strippers?
And so these ripe little egotists, in their culture of self-regard and self-celebration, where men are virtually blotted out except as foils for their intelligence and occasionally fulfillment of their animal fantasies – and so they go about, enjoying their sexual power, delaying the day when they should invest the ego that has been given them in children…
And guess what happens to them? That ego, rebuked in a thousand different ways, eventually sours. The girls get bitter – Sex & the City is about UNHAPPY WOMEN for f*ck’s sake! They remain ignorant of men – more than we are of them. And so, we grow estranged, and atomized. The law establishes an incentive for midde aged women to flee into the fantasy of fulfilled adulthood, financed by the former spouse, guarded by attack-dog lawyers – to do what? Grow more bitter in bars and among their friends, and to poison the minds of the younger women.
Anyway it’s f*cked up, but the problem is not that we like video games and hot naked chicks in lad magazines. And besides the problem is way less bad outside cities like New York. But unfortunately Hymowitz reflects the womanly blindspot that everyone here knows all too well. What – do you think we don’t want to get married and have kids too? Of course we do! We just don’t prattle on and on about it like a bunch of drunken sailors all the time. Damn.
