PJ Media

Whatever the weaknesses of the Hymowitz essay, Dr. Smith does not offer a convincing rebuttal. If I read her correctly, she theorizes that gender politics, especially the punitiveness of family law, has caused the deterioration of the young American male. Maybe she can generate some interviews that support her, but the actual patterns of American life fail to match any observable implications I would derive from Dr. Smith’s hypothesis:

1) If these guys are “going John Galt in the gender economy,” shouldn’t their neglect be strongest in the areas of personal development related to hunting mates and weaker as regards efforts that bring obvious rewards to unattached men as well? The reality, of course, is just the opposite; it’s educational performance and personal development where they are lagging, while chasing tail and the activities that support it still manage to get young men off the couch. Nor do the stats suggest that they are showing excessive care in preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies when hooking up, in clear rebuttal to any notion that family law (e.g., child support and visitation rights) is the deterrant.

2) I wonder how Dr. Smith would square her conclusions about the deterrant effects of family law with the psychology of deviance. As I understand it, the reason criminal penalties have little effect on the crime rate is because perps discount the risk of getting caught. So are we really supposed to expect the average young man starry-eyed with love/lust, who’d otherwise be hitching up, to be clear-headed enough to factor in the likelihood it will all fall apart — and demur lest he risk running afoul of alimony rules? Even if that’s true, wouldn’t our savvy legal navigator just reserve a few hundred dollars from the diamond-studded wedding budget to have someone draft a prenup?

3) If the lessons taught by marriage, divorce, and family law really explain the declining quality of the eligible bachelors out there, wouldn’t we expect to see the strongest aversion to marriage among guys who have been most intimately exposed to the system? Why then are divorced men so likely to remarry? Maybe because working wives still end up bearing far more than an equal share of housework and child rearing?

4) If we believe that young men are dropping out because of their discouragement with a system biased against them, should the pathology concentrate (or even appear) among affluent white Anglos, who often do quite well anyway? The system might be unfair, but it hardly seems reverse-discriminatory enough to send upper-middle-class members of the majority ethnic group scuttling to Mom’s basement in despair.

I don’t deny that changing gender relations are part of the story. Marriage is less motivational now that you can get sex pretty cheaply and frequently without it. Now that parents in affluent families typically both work — with a consequent increase in a teen’s wealth and autonomy and decrease in a teen’s interaction with mature adults (continuing a trend started in child-eat-child day care facilities) — leaving adolescence is a lot less motivational. In other words, altered gender relations likely made it easier for many young males to keep sponging off the parents and living like Alfie. (And no, the ones who’ve moved out are not necessarily driving, wearing, eating, talking into, playing with, or even living in stuff they bought for themselves).

But the difference in this altered “gender relations” hypothesis is that it does not attribute the problems to how life is stacked against young men (and therefore does not warrant all the resentment and whining that Ms. Hymowitz has provoked). It moves the focus to the price paid for neglecting the domestic sphere when women poured into the labor force. In particular, it suggests a need for greater concern with what the power and autonomy that comes with control over lots of unearned wealth does to the development of young people. In that sense, the real problem with the essay by Ms. Hymowitz is she asked the wrong question. The mystery is not why so many affluent American males see a limited need to develop themselves. The mystery is how many of their sisters managed to resist sinking into the same morass.