Descent of the Child-Man

America is changing. Yesterday's majority is today's minority, so get used to it.

But it came as a surprise to me to learn recently (though I should have seen it coming) that the adult is a disappearing demographic. There's said to be only about 100 left of them. It is reported:

According to alarming new figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau, the nation's population of mature adults has been pushed to the brink of extinction, with only 104 grown-ups remaining in the country today.

This people group is usually distinguished by traits such as, "foresight, rationality, understanding of how to obtain and pay for a mortgage, personal responsibility, and the ability to enter a store without immediately purchasing whatever items they see and desire."

How did this environmental(?) disaster develop so unnoticed? "[P]erhaps because of this group's unusual capacity to endure hardships with quiet dignity instead of whining loudly to draw attention to themselves."

Citing many social scientists who have studied this dwindling group, "Future generations, they soberly note, will likely go their whole lives never knowing a grown-up person."


Growing up seems to be a problem particularly (though not exclusively) among men, that is, among male human beings. For example, can you legitimately call the people in this Geico commercial "men?" Remember, the joke works only because there are so many of these guys out there. There are lots of guys in the viewing audience with cars that need insurance saying, "Yeah, really! Awesome, dude."



This has become a source of great frustration to women in search of men to take as husbands. They can't find any! They won't commit. They're goofy. They're more like boys. They're...man-boys.

This has been a theme for Kay Hymowitz these last few years. She began with an article in City Journal, "Child-Man in the Promised Land: Today’s single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood." She has now followed up with a book-length account of the problem, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys (Basic Books). You can read the Wall Street Journal article adapted from the book, "Where Have The Good Men Gone? Kay S. Hymowitz argues that too many men in their 20s are living in a new kind of extended adolescence."

In the 2008 article, Hymowitz described the all-too-familiar subject of study this way:

You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?...Some call this new period “emerging adulthood,” others “extended adolescence”...

You're 26, and you're all these things. And you are useless to women. Hymowitz argues (do child-men listen to arguments?) that this way of life does not bring out the best in men. What do women want? Though they may take them to bed (stop doing that!), "aging frat boys, maladroit geeks [and] grubby slackers" are not it.

So where did this happen? How do we come to have men between the ages of 18 and 34 with lots of money and no inclination to grow up, shoulder responsibility, and do hard things? Hymowitz's answer is in the subtitle to her book: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys. Men will fight wars, but they won't fight women. When women step forward and become men, men sit back and become boys. The feminist egalitarian utopia of women and men working side-by-side in freely chosen, asexual pursuits (politics, business, fighting fires, combat--you know, what you see everywhere on TV, but nowhere near as often in real life) is a fantasy with no foundation in human nature.

But on we go.

The Abolition of Men

Joe Queenan told us the other day that he is "sick of reading the 'Man Up, Barack' editorial" from the President's liberal detractors ("'Man Up, Obama' and Other Nonsense," Wall Street Journal, Oct. 26, 2009).

I am surprised that the thought of manly virtue enters the liberal mind at all. It has been central to the New Left liberal agenda for generations now to un-man men so that we may all live in a world that is not only sexually more egalitarian, but also safer.

Here are two articles on how boyhood is being abolished so that virility may trouble us no more.

Anthony Esolen gives us "A Requiem for Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution" (Touchstone, Sept. 2005).

Our boys are failing in school. Has it occurred to no one that we have checked them at every turn, perversely insisting that they must not form brotherhoods, that they must not identify their manhood with practical and intellectual skills that transform the world, and that they must not ever have the opportunity, apart from girls, to attach themselves in friendship to men who could teach them?

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island.

The second article is by James Bowman, the author of Honor: A History (Encounter Books, 2006). In his article, "The Decline of the Honor Culture: An Old Code Becomes Déclassé" (Policy Review, August/September 2009), he looks at how liberal passivism neuters our boys and will leave our country defenseless insofar as we allow it to continue.

It’s hard to persuade boys of military age that they have a duty to fight for their country when they have been taught from their earliest years that fighting of any kind is wrong and shameful and only leads to more fighting.

You should read this article alongside what C.S. Lewis says about "men without chests" in The Abolition of Man. James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington.

Where Are The Manly Men For Public Office?

It is sad that it takes a woman these days to tell a man how he ought to behave. Dorothy Rabinowitz tells us "What Sanford Should Have Said" (Wall Street Journal, June 26, 2009).

"I come before you in what is clearly a predicament, but without, I hope any pretense. There's no pretense in having an affair -- affairs are real, very compellingly so. There are lies, yes -- to one's wife and family and staff -- but that's a different story. And while I'm on the subject, let me say the only apology I plan to offer in public is to the members of my staff I left in confusion about my whereabouts with nonsense about hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
"I have no intention of babbling about mistakes, or about problems of exhaustion and stress that could have led to my affair -- and no intention of standing here, like so many dolts before me, looking vacant and miserable, as though I'd just come through some kind of punishment camp that left me brainwashed.
"I had an affair, not an overnight encounter -- and an affair, as you ladies and gentlemen of the media know -- is about falling for someone in a way that makes you forget about everything and everyone else. It's true for men, it's true for women.
"I knew what I was doing, and, yes, I loved it, and all its pains, too. That is an affair. It works till its over, and the price can be high. I don't expect to allow that price to include talking about this to the media, or answering their idiotic questions about how my wife feels, or whether I've talked to my children, or whether I can still imagine myself a contender for the presidency.
"Furthermore, I've seen too many breast-beaters in my situation deliver public apologies to their wives and children before crowds of reporters. I have no intention of taking part in any such bizarre -- not to mention shameless -- spectacle. A man who apologizes to his wife and children, who holds forth tearfully about having betrayed them, for media consumption, is, anyway, too lacking in dignity to hold public office of any kind.
"So let's understand this. I plan to straighten my tie, button my jacket, maybe buy a new suit, and go forward to do what I have to do. Life's complicated, ladies and gentlemen, but there's work to be done. I'll have nothing further on this, count on it.
"All the best."

Rabinowitz knows what a manly response to the situation would be because, as a woman, she knows what a woman admires in manliness.
Now that Hillary Clinton has fired off her last round, are there any men left to take command in America? Let's not look to Sarah Palin to save us.

Civilizational Suicide Part I

This is an interesting and encouraging development. Explorers is a branch of the Boy Scouts that trains young people in the techniques and discipline of law enforcement, including counter-terrorism and border patrol. ("Scouts Train to Fight Terrorists, and More," New York Times, May 13, 2009.) No doubt the left, upon reading this, will raise the roof, even though law enforcement is not only a necessary function, but also a noble ambition.

In 2005, Anthony Esolen published a marvelous article on the effect of the sexual revolution and its inevitable consequence, homosexual liberation, on friendship between men, and the devastating consequences of that for the sustainability of our civilization. Yes, it's that serious. ("A Requiem For Friendship: Why Boys Will Not Be Boys and Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution," Touchstone, Sept. 2005.)

The prominence of male homosexuality changes the language for teenage boys. It is absurd and cruel to say that the boy can ignore it. Even if he would, his classmates will not let him....

For good reason boys used to build tree houses and hang signs barring girls. They know, if only instinctively, that the fire of the friendship cannot subsist otherwise. If the company of girls is made possible, then the company of girls becomes a necessity, if only to avoid having to explain to others and to oneself why one would ever prefer the company of one’s own sex. Thus what is perfectly natural and healthy, indeed very much needed, is cast as irrational and bigoted, or dubious and weak; and thus some boys will cobble together their own brotherhoods that eschew tenderness altogether—criminal brotherhoods that land them in prison. This is all right by us, it seems....

In the name of protecting homosexuals, we ignore the feelings of boys and snatch from them their dwindling opportunities to forge just such friendships whereof homosexual relations are a delusive mimicry....

Reader, the next time you feel moved to pity the delicate man in the workstation near you, give a thought also to an adolescent somewhere, one among uncounted millions, a kid with acne maybe, a kid with an idea or a love, who needs a friend. Know then that your tolerance for the flambeau, which is little more than a self-congratulating cowardice, or your easy and poorly considered approval of the shy workmate’s request that he be allowed to “marry” his partner, means that the unseen boy will not find that friend, and that the idea and the love will die....

No civilization has been built without that foundation of male camaraderie directed toward civic ends: not Athens, not Rome, not Japan, not India. It remains to be seen whether any civilization can long endure without it. Looking at what used to be our cities, I’d say not.

Of course, these are just samples of the deep wells of insight that Esolen offers on this matter in the article. You must read the whole thing if you read anything.

Some of this insight can be found in popular culture, but only traces of it. Here is "Guy Love" from Scubs.




Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.

Boys Must Be Boys, But a Man's Gotta Do What a Man's Gotta Do

In "The Sportsman and the Well Lived Life," I question the worth of sports that don't point in any way to a productive life of some sort. "Much of modern athletic competition combines the awesome and the trivial--rare human ability combined with fruitless endeavor. But it has not always been so." Here is the video that got me thinking about it.



But these amazing basketball shots are something else entirely. (The song is really good too, but I don't know what it is. Well chosen. Suitable to the spirit of young men.)



I share the joy of these boys. I'm happy for them. And I'm impressed. But they're just boys. When boys become men, they put aside childish things and apply what they've learned as boys to serious adult pursuits.

This Danny MacAskill fellow, for example, is amazingly good on a bicycle, but unless he can find a military application for this skill he needs to stop wasting his life and turn to philosophy or business or something else that's not just goofing around impressively.



We have given far too much praise in the last half century to people who have never grown up, to adults who act like children. What does that say about us?