Is "Manning up" the answer?
"I don't think so," I thought as I read an email about Kay Hymowitz's new book, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.
The book has a foreword by Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism?
so I am hoping that it gives men a fair shake--though given the title, I have to wonder [Oops, just found out I was confused by the literature I received. Christina Hoff Sommers did not write the introduction to the book--she is giving the introduction at a luncheon for the book]. Here is the description from Amazon.com:
Okay, I haven't read the book--it just came out, but I am hoping that she is not blaming the problem on men and telling them to "man up" by giving women the marriage and family they want while putting themselves at risk. I am disturbed by one of the book blurbs by Richard Whitmire, author of "Why Boys Fail" who says:
If the blame is put on men because of their immaturity, Hymowitz still doesn't get it.
When someone tells you to "man-up," what do you think they are trying to tell you?
Update: So Glenn just got a nice autographed copy of the book in the mail. If I get a chance to read it soon, I will post more about it.
Update II: I just did a review of the book for Pajama's Media that will be up soon.
The book has a foreword by Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism? so I am hoping that it gives men a fair shake--though given the title, I have to wonder [Oops, just found out I was confused by the literature I received. Christina Hoff Sommers did not write the introduction to the book--she is giving the introduction at a luncheon for the book]. Here is the description from Amazon.com:In Manning Up, Manhattan Institute fellow and City Journal contributing editor Kay Hymowitz argues that the gains of the feminist revolution have had a dramatic, unanticipated effect on the current generation of young men. Traditional roles of family man and provider have been turned upside down as “pre-adult” men, stuck between adolescence and “real” adulthood, find themselves lost in a world where women make more money, are more educated, and are less likely to want to settle down and build a family. Their old scripts are gone, and young men find themselves adrift. Unlike women, they have no biological clock telling them it’s time to grow up. Hymowitz argues that it’s time for these young men to “man up.”
Okay, I haven't read the book--it just came out, but I am hoping that she is not blaming the problem on men and telling them to "man up" by giving women the marriage and family they want while putting themselves at risk. I am disturbed by one of the book blurbs by Richard Whitmire, author of "Why Boys Fail" who says:
“Kay Hymowitz does an exacting job describing the growing flock of man/children we're seeing, and she lays out the disturbing reality of the ‘marriageable mate’ dilemma that once affected only black women but has now become a broader phenomenon. Not only are there fewer college-educated men to marry, but many of those men who are available are little more than man/children—not anyone you would want your daughters to marry!”
If the blame is put on men because of their immaturity, Hymowitz still doesn't get it.
When someone tells you to "man-up," what do you think they are trying to tell you?
Update: So Glenn just got a nice autographed copy of the book in the mail. If I get a chance to read it soon, I will post more about it.
Update II: I just did a review of the book for Pajama's Media that will be up soon.
Labels: interesting books
posted by Helen at 1:43 PM
83 Comments:
A real man laughs off manipulative shaming tactics.
If a woman isn't doing as well as a man, it's all the man's fault. If she's doing better than a man, it's all the man's fault.
Dr. Helen,
I agree with your take on this, if, in fact, the author is indeed trying to say this. It's utterly ridiculous to expect that men should just go along with the flow and rise to the occasion. It's becoming more and more obvious that it's a foolish decision for any non-religious man to even consider marriage in today's environment. The legal system puts all the risk on men, and feminism has taken away most of the benefits.
And just to be clear - the benefit of a marriage relationship for a man is to have the support and faithful companionship of a woman. Feminism has taken that away. Today it's all about "partnership" where both parties have their worldly accomplishments to attend to. That's all well and good, but it's not worth the legal risks of marriage for most men. There is no shortage of women one can find if a man just wants someone to fool around with on a steady basis with no expectation of these other things. And if he can't expect those things in a marriage then really - why bother?
From someone I trust, being told to man up is their brusque way of saying "you can do this." From everyone else it is their attempt to shame me. Whatever!
Trey
What incentive do young men have for growing up—manning up so to speak? Girls become women by getting pregnant. I saw it over and over again in the high school classes that I taught. They receive status, admiration, independence, money, and praise for their bravery and sacrifice--and someone that loves them unconditionally. Boys get nothing for being responsible fathers, husbands, or adults. Instead, they lose status and freedom at every step. Being Baby Daddy to the most babies is the best they can hope to achieve.
I haven't been told to "man up" recently. What I thought someone meant by it would depend on the context and who was saying it.
Women are not truly equal until they are more than equal but a women are still attracted to better man so they can be equal in marriage (which again means more than equal).
I have an idea what Hymowitz thinks "manning up" is, based on the following reviewer quotes:
Freed from the old tests of manhood, such as the ability to marry and provide for a woman and children, they are biding their time, and leaving many of the best and brightest young women wondering, ‘where did all the good men go?’ -- Caitlin Flanagan
Manhood used to happen through marriage and fatherhood, boys becoming men by assuming caretaking responsibilities, usually by taking jobs in manufacturing. It made them grow up. -- Mark Bauerlein
Quotes are partial, emphasis is mine. If these are accurate reflections of Hymowitz's idea of manning up, it means getting married and providing for a woman. I haven't read the book, so I don't know for certain if this is her viewpoint. Still, that seems to be where she's going.
how would a woman know what it meant to "man up" anyway?
to man up has always meant to me that you toughen up and deal with the situation assertively.
seek information and solve problems.
if a woman said that to me, i would see it as a direct challenge, and probably ignore the person outright as obviously poorly equipped to assess the situation to begin with.
recently i remembered a situation that happened when i was in high school. i had returned to canada in the summer of 1977 from england where i had been on six weeks trials with a professional soccer club (ipswich town), and i had returned to high school because my english "o" levels weren`t recognised by the university i was supposed to attend on athletic scolarship (syracuse).
my father prompted my to take one more year of high school to meet the requirements of the university and take the scolarship.
so, i`m in gym class as a 17 year old, playing mixed european team handball. (for those who don`t know, it`s a particularly agressive mix of indoor soccer, basketball and rugby.) the mixed meant girls and boys.
so i get the ball and run into space and shoot the ball into the far corner of the net which, for some reason, had a girl in it....and the female gym teacher yells at me to not shoot so hard because there is a girl in the net, and i`m supposed to "take care" and not risk injuring her.
i still to this day don`t get that teachers problem, and i never will, 17 year old boys, especially top athletes, don`t hold back when in competition, so, to put a girl in net puts the girl at risk, i would say.
what was this supposed to teach us?
that women will be competing with us from now on, and that there will be special rules, was what i got.
with that and a number of other challenges i went to montreal and played semi-pro for a season and never did go to syracuse due to knee injuries, and never did see any girls on the pitch while there.
and as tmink said, there was an attempt to shame me for doing what was instinctive in my athletic reaction and i wasn`t expecting a lesson in "sharing" and wouldn`t have expected the lesson to be delivered in gym class anyway....i guess i was niave to emerging sexual politics, and the episode came as a shock.
Till I had read this I thought it was the Viagra slogan.
"When someone tells you to 'man-up,' what do you think they are trying to tell you?"
Think?
Trying?
I don't think, I *know*, that they're *actually* telling me that because I'm male, I'm not a real human being like them, and that the only way I can gain such value and status is by sacrificing my well-being, safety, health, and even life in exchange for them getting cheaper resources, infrastructure, manufacturing, defense, and so on.
"When they say it's not about money, it's about money." --H. L. Menken
It's not about manhood, never has been, never will be. It's about money.
Man: Know money, know clothes, know woman.
Boy: No money, no clothes, no woman.
The problem here is that girls are not making women. They're remaining stupid, spoiled, conceited little girls.
Is she going to be my life partner? No. Is she going to be my helpmate? No. Is she going to be the mother to raise our children? No.
Well, then, she isn't worth 50%.
I'm a man. I have money, and I have clothes. What I don't have is a woman. And why is that?
Because these stupid, spoiled, conceited little girls refuse to grow up. And I refuse to waste half of my money on any of them.
Oh, I'll buy her a tequilla shot and lie to her face. If she's willing to accept that, and most of them are, I'll have sex with her once and dump her in the morning before she wakes up. Then replace her with another bar slut the next night.
Does she really think she's irreplaceable? Um, I can get laid anytime I want. I have money, and I have clothes. What I don't have is a woman.
This is a female problem. And if girls are so stupid that they can't figure out what it means to grow up, well then they're worthless.
What I don't have is a woman
I see the phrase as a utility thing, having several purposes. One is, "Shut up and take it" is the primary. Another is, "Shut up and do it my way".
Come to think of it, "Shut up" sums up most uses of the expression.
@Dr. Helen,
If anyone ever tells me to 'man up', they'd get an unforgiving 'punch in the face'!
And what I'd tell Ms. Hymowitz: "GO SOAK YOUR HEAD"!
Eman
If someone asked me to "man up", I'd want them to be really specific about what they meant.
Right now, I have no idea what the author means by "manning up".
If he means "fulfill your responsibilities to your children" then I have no problem with that. No wives. No kids. No problems.
There remain important and highly effective legal and social obstacles to the re-establishment of the manly virtues. Women, particularly politically active gender-war feminists, have been complicit in erecting those obstacles. Men cannot tear them down without the cooperation of the fairer sex...unless, that is, we're willing to take quite a lot of risk on our own shoulders largely for women's sake, and for very little prospect of gain to ourselves.
Here's a question - why is it that males are supposed to "man up" but there's no analogous imperative directed at females? If there were, what would it be? "Woman up"? "Grow up"?
I'm fairly certain that she means that young men should be focused on bettering themselves, so that they can present as good mate material to women who are focused on bettering themselves -- i.e., the "problem" is that these hard-driving women are being deprived of hypergamously-satisfactory mates.
You can see that just from the various blurbs. Hymowitz herself is a right of center feminist -- someone who is critical of some of the "fallout" of the cultural revolution of the 60s-70s, and writes about that, but from the perspective of wanting people to get married and form successful families and so on. In other words, she is fairly typical of the criticism lobbed at men by the right today, which is essentially that men are not fulfilling their responsibilities (which means "not presenting as acceptable mates to women") and therefore should "man up" (which means "doing things that make you present as a more acceptable mate to women"). In the end, it's all about getting men to do what women want them to do.
The irony in all of this is that men *have already* adapted to the post-feminist post-sexual-revolution world. They just haven't done it in the way that feminist women (especially right-wing feminists) wanted. There seems to have been this desire that men would see all of these massive changes taking place and yet just keep following the same basic script men had always followed with a few tweaks (spend more time with kids, change more diapers, wash more dishes, perform more cunnilingus, etc.). Instead, men looked at the changes and adapted behaviors for *their own* benefit, just as women had done with their little revolution.
How? In various ways. Some men become players, because the loose sexual mores feminists fought for actually benefit men who are players tremendously, and all men see that. Some men decide to forego the traditional roles of provider and husband and so on in favor of ESPN, X-Box and Guyland, and have a blast doing it. And why not? If women were supposed to be exhilarated by abandoning their own traditional roles, why don't men get to do so as well? Oh, I see, you wanted men to adapt to the roles that women were running away from, rather than adopting their own "new, non-traditional" way of living, eh? Oh well -- guess that was wishful thinking, now wasn't it. And yet, although these guys are not wards of the state, although they make enough money for their bills and their cable and their internet porn and their beer and so on ... it's a HUGE PROBLEM because look at how spectacular driven Jenny is, but she can't find a suitable mate! Somebody call 911!!
Seriously, this stuff makes me laugh, because I know it's just going to get worse in the next 1-2 generations due to the college matriculation rates. The future of educated white American women is going to get much more like the present of educated black American women, and pretty much nothing can be done to stop it. Certainly tying to shame men into "manning up" is going to have zero, zilch, nada impact -- just change the channel, close the window, flip on the X-box, crack open the beer and it's back to our own lives.
And I'll be happily ensconced on my couch with popcorn watching this all unfold, laughing out loud.
Fred: thanks for the funny! Viagra, indeed!
About being told to "man up", it would be dependent on context and speaker. If a family member or close friend told me that, I would take it to mean stop moping/bitching/crying/complaining and get going.
I would find it insulting if the phrase comes from people outside my closest circle of family/friends. I'm going to steal one of the reviewers quote for an example:
Freed from the old tests of manhood, such as the ability to marry and provide for a woman and children, they are biding their time, and leaving many of the best and brightest young women wondering, 'where did all the good men go?' -- Caitlin Flanagan
my take? suck it up, buttercup. Oh, wait, that sounds condescending and demeaning, don't it? yeah, but so does "man up".
In the mean time, I'm going to order up an extra large popcorn, and sit back and enjoy the show!
Generally, the phrase means, "Shut up and put up with whatever I/we want you to do, you lout." Didn't used to. It's kind of like the phrase, "a good sport," which most often refers to someone willing to silently put up with more degradation than someone with self-respect would ever consider.
there's no analogous imperative directed at females?
"Suck it up, buttercup" works for me on several levels. It's vaguely naughty, and contains a reference to Princess Buttercup from Princess Bride, who was, shall we say? a tad spoiled.
Shoe. Foot. Other.
I think people underestimate what government meddling has done to relationships, especially marriage.
It should surprise no one that when you financial reward someone for leaving, they leave.
It should surprise no one that when a divorce will cost someone their children and ruin them financially for life, that they become passive and far too tolerant of nonsense, and even violence.
We tell men to man up, then destroy them if they do.
It's insane.
It's also not just women. Check out Dave Ramsey's column today:
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=263693
Short version:
Question 1: Man has girlfriend who piles up debt, walked off her job, is considering filing bankruptcy, and she want to move in with him to solve her money problems. Dave's Answer: Don't do it now, but doesn't mean she isn't worthy of your love so no reason not to date her.
Question 2: Husband uses debt for projects saying he can pay it off. Dave's Answer: This guy needs a swift kick in his rear end because he's an overgrown teenager instead of a husband.
How's that for fairness between the sexes?
Almost all women choose who they're going to have sex with - and thus who they'll possibly procreate with (though most men and women aren't, at their own peril, thinking of this possibility) - and 100% of women (minus, I guess, the one or two grotesquely fat women who don't even realize that they're pregnant until they squirt out a baby) choose to have children.
The overwhelmingly vast majority of divorces are initiated by women and courts grant women custody of children in the vast majority of cases. And regardless of what kind of environment children are being raised in, most - if not almost all - of them are being raised primarily by their mothers.
Women demanded that public education system be redesigned to meet the needs of girls at the expense of boys. Thus, almost all boys (minus the statistically-insignificant number of boys of who go to schools that provide a learning environment that is suited to boys' needs) are going to schools that are hostile to the needs of boys, thus turning many (I'm not sure if it's most at this point but it's certainly an enormous part of the population of boys) off of schooling. On top of that, primary school teachers - who, outside of parents, have the most significant impact on the likelihood of any child's educational success - are almost always women (and the number of male teachers is falling rapidly, and not only for elementary school teachers).
Women have turned America's colleges and universities into some of the most anti-male institutions in the country (second, perhaps, only to family courts) and perhaps even the world, thus causing many men to drop out who, but for the hostility that they encountered, might have graduated.
So let's recap. Women choose to have children and the environment in which they'll be raised and do almost all of the raising of them, designed the public school systems to meet the needs of their daughters at the expense of their sons, account for the vast majority of all primary school teachers, and have turned colleges and universities into man-hating institutions...
...and now they're whining about the dearth of marriageable men out there, where one of the biggest determinants (second, perhaps, only to money) is whether a man A) had a mother who gave a rat's ass about his needs as a boy, B) made it through a public education system that is inimical to his needs, and C) then chose to subject himself to hateful treatment at the hands of university professors and students.
Boo...fricking...hoo.
Women have only themselves and their mothers to blame and their daughters will have only themselves and their mothers and grandmothers to blame. Women created this problem. I see no reason why men should care about the bitter women who caused the unhappy situations in which they now find themselves.
Women are not truly equal until they are more than equal but a women are still attracted to better man so they can be equal in marriage (which again means more than equal).
You're misunderstanding their intent when they "marry up". It has nothing to do with men. Women "marry up" because they're competing with other women. Women want to marry doctors and lawyers and movie stars and athletes and millionaires so they can prove to other women how much more desirable they are than those other women. It's not because they love the guys they're with (we find out how much they love them when they head to divorce court) and want to spend time with them (highly-successful don't have a lot of free time).
Speaking as a man, I say young men today should "man up". They need to get an education and better themselves and seek non-feminist women who are truly marriagable, women who want to be wives and mothers. They are certainly out there, however, you are more likely to find them at church instead of singles bars.
what the fuck? After all the bitching about equality and "grrrl power" and "you go girl!" what really needs to happen is someone to give them money for life? and if he doesn't he isn't a man?
What a bunch of whores women have become.
If you realize what women are (human beings, not goddesses up on a pedestal), these statements are just funny.
What's not so funny is when the ideas get put into law. If men are not going to let themselves be hooked into taking on responsibilities, we are going to bring the responsibilities to them.
A couple of examples: Canada and the UK are now imposing marriage-like responsibilities on men who simply live together with women. Some US states are now considering it.
Also, there is an idea coming up that you may have to pay child support if you form a close and intimate bond with a woman who has a child (that is not biologically yours).
That is only going to go further as men realize what a sucker deal marriage is.
The more feminists talk, the more they seal the fate of relationships between men and women.
The obnoxious selfishness in views like this is amazing.
Boys are falling far behind in school and losing interest in participating in society, and that is bad because ... not enough women will be able to get a sap to pay for a comfortable life for them, to pay for the ability to not have to engage in soul-destroying, stressful types of work over decades, and to pay for a lifestyle to which she will grow accustomed should a divorce / alimony action be necessary.
What if masses of women started getting a disease that left them bedridden for the rest of their lives.
And a man wrote that it was bad because ... lots of men wouldn't have women to make sandwiches for them or pick up their stuff around the house.
He would be universally shunned for being a moron.
Yet women who essentially think the same thing are defended by lots of men and even more women. Kind of unreal.
"Not only are there fewer college-educated men to marry, but many of those men who are available are little more than man/children—not anyone you would want your daughters to marry!”
Assertions like these, from the blurb you quoted, always need to be examined. Are they true? Joel Best (in his book Stat-Spotting) demonstrates that the claim that there are fewer college-educated men is simply not true. The number (and percentage) of college-age boys going to college continues to go up. The statistics about the drop in the percentage of boys in college simply means that boys make up a smaller percentage of the total (male and female) college-attending population, reflecting that more girls are going to college than in the past, thus resulting in the male-female make-up of the college population more nearly reflecting the male-female percentages in the population as a whole. To illustrate(the numbers are approximations but are in the ballpark): Boys are 50% of the college population today, but were 75% 40 years ago. This means the percentage of boys in college has declined 33% (75% minus 50% is 25% which is 33% of 75%). This is the case even though the number and percentage of college-age boys going to college have gone up. It is just that the number and percentage of girls going to college have gone up even faster. This does not mean there are now a lot more boys not going to college.
But maybe turn-about is fair play. Innumeracy to show discrimination against men is the mirror of the innumeracy used to show discrimination against women.
Finally, where are all these men-children? I know lots of young men and would not consider any of them men-children. Maybe the author and the blurb-writer are hanging out in the wrong circles.
I'll wait for Helen to read the book and get back to us.
The premise is complete and utter sexist bullshit.
Men not obeying the expectations of a perfect stranger who happens to have a vagina is being a child?
Men excercising their reproductive freedom and personal authonomy is being a child?
When women are engaging in the same behavior, they are "empowered" and "modern".
Young men aren't doing the bidding of women and forgoing to shackle themselves to a mate who may very well bankrupt them and destroy their lives aided by the force of the law. Thats not being a child, thats being wise and prudent.
The only ones to blame for this state of affairs are feminists. They got what they wanted via the law.
The behavior that most resembles that of a child is the failure to recognise the harsh legal and financial consequences that can and will result in sex with random strangers at a bar should she decide that she wants a baby and you get picked to be the wallet she enslaves to her via pregnancy. One other behavior that most resembles that of a child is that of women who think they deserve preference over men.
A couple of examples: Canada and the UK are now imposing marriage-like responsibilities on men who simply live together with women. Some US states are now considering it.
Beyond palimony?
Also, there is an idea coming up that you may have to pay child support if you form a close and intimate bond with a woman who has a child (that is not biologically yours).
Among the myriad reasons for why a man should never date a single mother, this is the most important. In most, if not all, states, if a man and child develop a mutual father-child bond, the man can be forced to pay child support, even if he's barred from seeing the child (most states still have presumption-of-paternity laws). However, in some states (I'm not sure if it's most but I'm positive that Michigan, California, and Washington are three of them), if a woman tells a child that any man whom she happens to be dating at the time is the kid's father, the man can be held liable for child support, even if he never led the child to believe that he's the father.
the claim that there are fewer college-educated men is simply not true. The number (and percentage) of college-age boys going to college continues to go up. The statistics about the drop in the percentage of boys in college simply means that boys make up a smaller percentage of the total (male and female) college-attending population, reflecting that more girls are going to college than in the past, thus resulting in the male-female make-up of the college population more nearly reflecting the male-female percentages in the population as a whole. To illustrate(the numbers are approximations but are in the ballpark): Boys are 50% of the college population today, but were 75% 40 years ago. This means the percentage of boys in college has declined 33% (75% minus 50% is 25% which is 33% of 75%).
Not really the case in the US at least, Rob.
See: http://www.boysproject.net/statistics.html
The breakdown in college graduation rates is not 50/50. It's approaching 60/40, and is predicted to bump over 60/40 in the next generation.
Sure the total *number* of men graduating from college has increased, but that's not really relevant to the mating market - doesn't matter much to young women if the aggregate total number of peer-age men with degrees is higher than it was in the past if, at the same time, the total aggregate number of young women with degrees exceeds them by 20%. Sure the pie has gotten bigger, but more of the pie is women, meaning that there are fewer peer men, relative to the number of women looking for them as mates. In the mating game what matters is the ratio, not the aggregate number, because the ratio is what drives the marketplace.
When someone that I love and respect tells me to “man up” I see it as polite encouragement. When a woman I’ve never met says it, I see it for what it is:
She wants me to do her bidding, and is framing it in such a way as to shame me into it, because we all know a “real man” would want whatever a woman wants, too, and should never have desires and aspirations of his own.
It is what I’ve been saying all along. An independent, unattached man is described as a man-child by these harping feminist harridans, because he won’t do what they want him to do; what they see as being the “manly” thing and marrying someone and settling down. Paradoxically, it is this very man that women are generally attracted to because evolution has lead women to desire independent, self-reliant men. Of course, since feminism has brow-beaten women into believing that they want a compliant, subservient house-boy instead of a self-reliant, independent man, they will start to try and mold him to their ways, leaving the poor man with two options:
1.) Allow her to change him. She will stop liking him because he has become a lamentable wuss and stop being the man she fell for in the first place, and she will lose respect for him and probably leave him.
2.) Stand strong. She will continue nagging and hectoring him for the rest of their days until he can’t take it anymore, and he either leaves her or eats a bullet.
There is only one other option, and it seems painfully rare these days. He stands strong and through explanation and discussion, gets her to see the truth, and they both live happily ever after.
The great irony here is that these feminist harpies don’t even seem to understand that their attitudes towards men are self-fulfilling prophecies – they lament that men won’t settle down with them by calling them children and telling them that they are not real men and need to “man up” and then wonder why no man wants to be with them. Of course, it is all the man’s fault – I mean, who wouldn’t want to be with a woman who calls you a child and tells you that you are not a real man until you do what she says you should do?
In all the pre-industrial cultures I am familiar with, boys are turned into men by an initiation run by the men. The boys literally leave the world of women and children and move into the world of men.
In these cultures, the ones I know about (other examples pro and con would be appreciated) men are made by men.
So our problem is that there are no men in the lives of too many boys. They have no father in the home to guide and initiate them. I am not familiar with a culture where the women can make boys men, so these boys are out of luck and on their own. You can't man up unless you understand what it is to be an initiated man of power. And apparently manning up boys is the exclusive domain of the now disenfranchised males. So chalk up another social disaster from the progressive's good intentions.
As an aside, I have a 8 year old little guy that I am helping to butch up. I have not done that for a few years it seems. We are talking about and practicing being tough and brave rugged. He is getting picked on because he is in a rural county setting and very soft and sensitive and the boys don't want to have anything to do with him.
Is this making him a man? Probably not! But it will give him a model and some practice in being more manly looking and acting.
Trey
I wonder how many reviews there will be on Amazon before the book has even been released. What the world needs is a book on the issue written by a first-rate economist. I nominate John Lott. And, oh yes, in 97% of mammalian species, there is no paternal investment in offspring beyond the level of sperm. These man/boys are behaving like typical male mammals. Sorry about that ladies!
Novaseeker,
Thanks for the cite. I may respond more fully later, but just a couple of thoughts now:
As I understand the data, boys and girls are getting into college at rates roughly proportional to their percentages in the population as a whole. If women are graduating at greater rates, then it means men are dropping out of college at a higher rate. That could be the result of a number of factors that would not render the drop-outs unsuitable mates for women who do graduate. Think about that college drop-out Bill Gates who left before graduating to found Microsoft.
The assumption which I think is being made -- if I am misunderstanding your point, I apologize -- is that women who graduated from college can find suitable mates only among men who graduated as well -- and men who attended college but did not graduate cannot qualify. I really wonder if that is true.
There is the broader point whether obtaining a college degree is the same as obtaining an education. If not, then women who graduated and men who did not may well be equally educated (or un-educated) and thus suitable for each other.
Again, thanks for your response to my posting. You raise some interesting questions that I want to think about more.
Regards,
Rob
The assumption which I think is being made -- if I am misunderstanding your point, I apologize -- is that women who graduated from college can find suitable mates only among men who graduated as well -- and men who attended college but did not graduate cannot qualify. I really wonder if that is true.
There are two factors at play here, both of which are traits women are overwhelmingly more likely to display than men:
1) credentialism
2) hypergamy
So yes, for a lot of women those men are indeed invisible.
I wonder what percentage of modern women can recognize a solid man who would make a good husband. I think we learn that from observing the husband-wife interactions of our parents and using that for positive and negative markers. So no marriage, no model of marriage.
Trey
I see that some men are openly questioning what, exactly, is there for them in modern Marriage 2.0?
Well, I offer the words of the (supposedly) “Thinking Housewife”, Laura Wood, who points out that no matter what may happen to you (men) who will “man up” and marry a woman, you can still have your “honor”:
”Men have nothing to fear in marriage other than the loss of their own honor. That is the only thing that counts and it is something each man controls and no wife can destroy.”
This one is even better than her previous low-point of trying to tell men who’ve been “screwed-over” by women that they should just take solace in the knowledge that they remained moral and upright (while women walked all over them, cheated on them, cuckolded them, dumped/divorced them, accused them of DV, accused them of molestation of their own children, deprived them of access to the lives of those children, and ass-raped them via the courts).
Absolutely amazing!
So, men have nothing to fear but the loss of honor (meaning, of course, that they themselves, would start to act “badly” as women screw them over)? Just more of the “stand their and take it like a man” BS. If you just let yourself get screwed-over and don’t complain about it, then you have your “honor”?
Well, what man could possibly turn down such wonderful advice/consolation?
Rob --
Fair points.
I think when you look at the datasets I linked from the US census you'll also see that matriculation rates are also quite disparate in favor of women and it isn't the case that it starts off equal and then there's a huge drop-off during the various years of college -- a small drop-off but not a huge one. The gap is smaller than the graduation gap, which means that a part of the graduation gap is due to dropouts, but a much larger part of it is due to men simply not matriculating. When you get to the level of professional degrees and doctorates it's closer to 50/50, with men still having more professional degrees, and women having slightly more doctorates.
On your point that college educated women can find mates among men who didn't complete college, this is true in some cases (say, nurses and policemen), but I do think that a lot of women who *do* have a college degree or higher will be looking for men with the same. It's not uncommon at all for that to be an expectation, at least from what I have heard from women and read as well.
As for the broader issue in the article, I think this is only one piece of it. Women are complaining not only because there are fewer men who are college grads (or even entering college), but also because the guys who *are* college grads are not interested in commitment. This is a separate, but related, issue, I think. The men are behaving this way because they can. The less competition they have, the more they can behave this way, because the less competition they have, the more the ratio swings in their favor. So, in my view, this "where are the good men" issue is going to get worse, because the number of guys who are educated, period, is continuing to decline relative to women, leaving the guys who do have this with a lot of power to dictate the terms of their relationships with women who want similarly educated men as mates.
This is the real irony of the situation and why women like Hymowitz find it so upsetting. Women embraced education and career advancement in the name of personal empowerment. But, in this area, due to the growing sex ratio difference and how that interplays with the lax sexual mores of post-feminist culture, they are the ones who are disempowered, and it's the men who are calling the relationship shots and making things the way *they* want them to be. In short, it's the problem women are having in college translating to the post-college years, which is totally unsurprising, yet understandably irritating for women. For me, I find it humorous, because this was a self-inflicted wound in nearly every way.
Alright time for my two cents.
Man up means one of two things. Either an encouragement from loved ones/ friends to get off your duff stop moping. Or it can mean the derogatory, shut up do what I say and you are not a man till I say so.
The author is right in that the old roles are gone, but the problem seems to be there are no roles to replace it. They seem to want men to slip into the old roles, though the man will no get any of the benefits that role used to provide.
So we go away. We ignore, we seek fulfillment in other men's company and with hobbies. What do they expect us to do?
I have a question for the other guys here.
Why are you willing to take this "man up" crap if it comes from someone in your close friends and family?
Because I can't see how it makes a meaningful difference whether they're strangers or family/friends. If I was bummed out, despondent, moping, whatever term you want to use, and someone who's supposed to support me when I'm like that told me to "man up" instead, I'd find it beyond insulting. I'd feel betrayed, and I'd start questioning whether I should continue to associate so closely with them.
“Jim said... Speaking as a man, I say young men today should "man up". They need to get an education and better themselves and seek non-feminist women who are truly marriagable, women who want to be wives and mothers. They are certainly out there, however, you are more likely to find them at church instead of singles bars.”
The churchy women have the same way of thinking but they will also use religiosity as a way to shame and control men. Often these women also believe in a moral superiority in addition to feminist superiority, all the while claiming they do not believe in feminism. Not one churchy woman is willing to give up her entitlement to special treatment by society and under the law. The religious divorce rate is not much different.
There was a study done once, I forget by who, in which it was found that the best way to make someone do well in school and in life in general is to provide them with proper encouragement. Yet in American schools all across the nation only the girls are encouraged, and looking at PTA websites and other education-oriented websites, I see massive feminist dogma declaring that only girls are worth the time to teach or encourage and thus the complete lack of any encouragement of male students is excused, even justified. It is no mystery why males are falling behind in school where once they were doing fine. Feminists have been attacking and discouraging them since the 1970s, with the predictable result that we see today.
Add to this what Dr. Finkelhor at the University of New Hampshire found in 1995, that we have a rising epidemic of sexual violence against males in our schools, mostly encouraged by misguided parents teaching girls to attack the boys testicles any time they feel like it, and movies and TV shows that glorify it, and you have a bunch of sexually abused boys more concerned about when the next assault will be than about learning more women's studies propaganda disguised as American history or science or English. Last years news story out of Indiana where it was found that boys there are being sexually assaulted every day in their public schools and many are having to be hospitalized for emergency castration due to ruptured testicles and you see a very real war on boys, a vicious sexual war, where survival is what they have to learn, and teachers, school security/police, and lawmakers are doing absolutely nothing to help them. Add to that the police roaming the halls of their schools, not protecting them, but Tasering boys of all ages, usually targeting the genitals as this is what Taser International says is proper use of their weapon, and you can begin to imagine what a nightmare daily life is for the modern American schoolboy.
Our nation has fully embraced feminism's hatred of males, with its firmly held view that males are not worth the time, effort, or resources needed to even enable them to live a basic and normal life. Hillary Clinton says it repeatedly in her speeches, that she believes that only girls are worthwhile and that by ignoring the males and excluding them all of society is improved. This is not just Hillary's view. This is the view of all of Washington DC, New York City's elite, and Hollywood, too. This is the view of our educators at all levels. Even various supposedly Christian institutions have adopted this very unBiblical, unloving view of males as parasites and irrelevant.
We hear plenty of complaints about males, but mostly only from the perspective of how it affects females. They say admitting you have a problem is the first step towards solving it. I'd say those in the highest positions of power in this country don't even admit there is a problem and we are nowhere near even beginning to address it in any meaningful way.
This comment has been removed by the author.
Quite the war going on at Amazon.com over the first (very negative) review.
"The religious divorce rate is not that different."
Not according to this report. http://bpnews.net/BPnews.asp?ID=34656
Of course, the source of this report is the Southern Baptists so I don't know how much objectivity it can claim.
Jason hit it in the first comment. "Man up" is "manipulative shaming tactic." How about if some of these feminists just shut up.
Feminists and their cohorts have built a society hostile to males and, then, don't like how males react to it. Entitlement to its highest. Work towards equalizing the males in college, etc and maybe, just, maybe things will improve. But, for the feminists its always about them and getting what they want. Giving and sharing are foriegn concepts.
Actually, now that I think about it a little more, I find the idea of hearing "man up", when depressed or whatever, from someone in my close family or friends whom I would normally expect to support me, to be even WORSE than hearing it from a complete stranger.
I would really appreciate getting some feedback on this. There's a massive disconnect here between my views and those of commenters here whom I regularly agree with, and I'd like find out why.
"and the female gym teacher yells at me to not shoot so hard because there is a girl in the net, and i`m supposed to "take care" and not risk injuring her."
Be careful wth that! I know a guy, almost went pro when he was younger, was playing a soccer game. There were some women playing...he had some trepidation, but played anyways. So, he gets in a situation, but it was with a woman...instead of playing his usual move, he eases up for the woman. He got nailed in the head, traumatic brain injury, been two years "recovering", if that's the word. He was a genius beforehand.
He said it never would have happened, had it been a guy. All his moves, were predicated on a guy opponent. A woman just messed it up.
If it's you or her, make sure it's her.
I haven't read this book either, but I've read some of Hymowitz's other work. She's been published on this subject on CNN.com and a few other sites.
The basic problem with her 'thesis' is that she's working with a fantasy world of super high achieving women vs damaged low achieving men. This caricature permeates her work. All of her women are surgeons, astronauts, and CEO's, while her men are immature schlubs barely able to hold a job at Game Zone.
A cursory review of labor and education stats contradicts her depiction rather strongly. Women still don't make up the majority of the workforce, much less the full time workforce. They also tend to be concentrated proportionally in low to medium skilled services, with the exception of nursing.
Here are the top ten occupations for women..
1. Secretaries and administrative assistants, 3,074,000
2. Registered nurses, 2,612,000
3. Elementary and middle school teachers, 2,343,000
4. Cashiers, 2,273,000
5. Nursing, psychiatric, and home health aides, 1,770,000
6. Retail salespersons, 1,650,000
7. First-line supervisors/managers of retail sales workers, 1,459,000
8. Waiters and waitresses, 1,434,000
9. Maids and housekeeping cleaners, 1,282,000
10. Customer service representatives, 1,263,000
So it's not evident most women are going to be encountering a dilemma. And the women, like herself, that she is concerned about would probably reject 80% of men for their status even under ideal conditions. They're always going to want to be with the top X% of men. What she's really complaining about is that there aren't going to be as many high status men, for women like her, in the future.
Here's a one sheet w/ stats if you're interested - http://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/main.htm
And the women, like herself, that she is concerned about would probably reject 80% of men for their status even under ideal conditions
I find it rather amusing to hear women like her, who take getting a top status man as a woman's birthright, insult and shame men for wanting pretty women.
While it's true men want pretty women, very, very few have a birthright mentality regarding female beauty, or will reject less than model quality women the same way women like her reject less than top 5% men.
What she's really complaining about is that there aren't going to be as many high status men, for women like her, in the future.
Yes, that's exactly the complaint. It is a complaint based on Manhattan and DC and LA and so on.
The basic complaint is that here we have all these high-achieving, ambitious, breathless 20-something women in Manhattan wearing themselves out with career advancement and socializing with their friends and "getting ahead" and we have their peer education/age men who are living in Guyland --*not* "schlubs", but guys with the same education/class/age as the women, but not hellbent on their careers or "getting ahead" but more interested in having fun, playing X-Box, doing SportsCenter, not getting too serious in relationships and so on. In other words "unwilling/unsuitable to commit". And that last point is the main complaint, as it has been from women for years -- why aren't men committing/why aren't there are "emotionally available" men. This is the latest packaging of the complaint.
The educational trends, however, will only make this worse, for these women in particular, as they are the ones who are the most high-flying among the educated and therefore the ones who are less likely to want to marry a policeman or contractor (much less than, say, a nurse or social worker would, both of whom are "educated" but not in the highly-driven, high-flying Manhattan world of ambition).
Kay Hymowitz lives in that world (as does most of the academic and media elite), so that is what they see, and it's what they write about.
Most women doctors I know marry male doctors they meet in either medical school or specialty training. One exception I see is with women surgeons who often choose men who are paramedics or firemen. They have lots of time off, are very macho guys for the most part and make pretty good money, even if less than she does.
One of my female students, a gorgeous girl, married her high school sweetheart, an auto mechanic. He wasn't even that macho a guy but they were happy.
Novaseeker,
I have looked at the statistics on the Boys Project web site. They are very interesting -- thanks again for pointing them out.
I am not sure I know what to make of them. If I am reading the statistics correctly, they tell us that the first year classes in college are 56% female -- 44% male. But the fourth-year classes in college are less than 52% female and more than 48% male. This seems to suggest that the drop-out rate during the first three years of college is higher for women than it is for men. But, then, the percentages for bachelor's degrees earned are 58% female to 42% male. All that is puzzling to me, since it suggests that women drop out more than men between the first and fourth years of college, but men drop out at a high rate between the start of the fourth year and graduation. Does that make sense?
Then, as you note, men earn 52% of the first professional degrees while women earn 52% of the doctoral degrees.
My take-away is that (1) the graduation rates at the professional and doctoral levels are roughly equal for men and women and (2) there is something a bit funky going on with the statistics for the undergraduate years -- freshman year through graduation.
I am going to spend more time thinking about all this. At this point, I am not sure the statistics paint the bleak picture for males that people are assuming. The general population is 51% female and 49% male. According to the Boys Project statistics, the enrollment in the fourth year of college is 52% female and 48% male, the awarding of first professional degrees is 52% male and 48% female, and the awarding of doctor's degrees is 52% female and 48% male.
I have to say these numbers seem to me to be awfully close to being proportional to the male-female percentages in the general population.
I would love to have your reaction. Am I missing something here?
Regards,
Rob
I always find it incredibly humorous how the overwhelming majority of young men aren't "stuck" anywhere but are thrilled as can be to no longer give away their lives and their fortunes for a woman, a marriage, and a family.
It's also incredibly humorous what some women of alleged intelligence will tell themselves in order to keep their false sense of self-worth at a very high level.
But hey... if thinking that these young men simply aren't "grown up" placates them... let them think it.
I would love to have your reaction. Am I missing something here?
Rob --
I don't think you're missing something, but I guess I don't see why 58/42 is being considered to be roughly 50/50 when it's actually a 16% discrepancy, and even if you adjust for the overall sex ratio, is still a 14% discrepancy.
As for the college years, my approach to interpreting them is that there is flux in each of the years in college but everyone has to (1) start at the beginning and (2) finish (if they graduate). So to me the most important or interesting stats on the undergraduate level are the ones about matriculation (first year students .. if you're never a first year student, you never get to second year, etc.) and graduation. And the 58/42 graduation rate at the college level is a concern ... I don't think the other 16% (or 14% if you want to adjust for the overall sex ratio) are all Bill Gates types, really. Do you?
When you get to the advanced degree level, my guess is that, even though you have disparate numbers in the pool of applicants, more of the smaller pool of men are either more qualified or more inclined to apply for advanced degrees than women. That's the case even where the women are leading 52/48, because that's still a significant jump from the total potential pool of applicants, which is 58/42 (i.e., a +6%/4% difference, which is significant). It's even more slanted in the other advanced pool, where it's 52/48 in favor of men (a full 10%/8% jump from the percentage of men in the aggregate college graduate pool).
The real problem is the college graduation rate, because that's a much bigger pool than the advanced degree pool is. In other words, the group of people that is impacted by the 58/42 imbalance is a much, much larger group than the much more balanced, but much smaller, advanced degree group. As a result, I really question why one would conclude that overall the educational situation is roughly 50/50. It really isn't, unless you consider a 16%/14% discrepancy in the largest higher educational pool to be "close enough" to 50/50 so as to not be important.
As I say above, however, this is only one piece of the bundle of issues addressed in this thread and addressed by Hymowitz if her book is anything like her City Paper article a few years ago on Man Children. Hymowitz is writing in a particular context, which has particular kinds of people in it. But my main point is that the difficulties that the women Hymowitz is referring to are experiencing are only going to be worse if the male college graduate ratio is low compared to the female college graduate ratio, assuming such women will generally prefer peer-educated men as mates (which Hymowitz does assume, because most college educated women in, say, Manhattan are also looking for college educated men as mates). But, as I say, that ratio is only one aspect of the issue, and perhaps not the most important one -- more likely one that exacerbates other, more fundamental issues.
Novaseeker,
I agree that 58/42 for graduation is not 50/50. But one of the points I was trying to make is, the undergraduate numbers seem odd to me. They indicate that 58 percent of the entering and graduating classes are female but less than 52 percent of the fourth year classes are female. I don't understand how the numbers get that way, unless a lot of women drop out in the first three years and then a whole lot of men drop out in the fourth year.
Let's assume that you have 100 first year students. According to these numbers, 58 would be female and 42 would be male. But then, to produce the 52%/48% split shown at the beginning of the fourth year 12 of the women would have had to drop out and none of the men. Then, to produce the 58%/42% graduation percentages shown on the web site, 8 of the boys and none of the girls would have had to drop out between the beginning of the fourth year and graduation.
Those numbers seem implausible to me -- I do not understand them. And I am reluctant to draw conclusions from numbers that I don't understand.
This has been an enjoyable exchange with you. I am off to bed.
As I said in the other thread, I'd like to see KH's numbers because I don't see the "epidemic" of "man-children." I seem to recall her 2008 article on the subject didn't have any real numbers in it, just a discussion of media trends like bromance movies and maxim magazine, as if Maxim was an obscene and seditious product. (And she managed to completely miss the idea that a generation of men portrayed as dolts on TV might have something to do with men not wanting to go the extra mile.)
Novaseeker is absolutely right that KH is really giving voice to her urban coastal elite hypergamy. Not enough men for women to choose from, and not enough men who feel lucky to be with a woman that they will fold over for whatever she wants.
When you capitalized Manning I thought it was going to be about Wikileaks.
As an aside, I have a 8 year old little guy that I am helping to butch up. I have not done that for a few years it seems. We are talking about and practicing being tough and brave rugged. He is getting picked on because he is in a rural county setting and very soft and sensitive and the boys don't want to have anything to do with him.
Trey,
out of curiosity, what kinds of things are you doing to help him?
Zorro, what do you mean a war? There are only three user reviews and one comment in response.
Zorro/dunkel,
I read the negative review when it was the only one on the page, but since then it and its attendant debate has apparently been deleted. I guess Amazon doesn't have the stomach for the truth.
Thanks for the update, Topher. There's no indication that such a review was ever there. The Ministry of Truth in action.
dunkel, I have worked with about 10effiminate country boys over the years. The problem as I see it is they have unconscious behavior patterns which single them out for ridicule and hostility. We work on changing those behaviors.
One of the first things we work on is tightening up their wrist! A loose wrist gesturing while speaking screams "ridicule me" in their world. I have shown them youtubes of Billy Mays who has the stiffest wrist I have ever seen. His wrists do NOT move or bend in the commercials!
Then we work on finding them some boyish interests that they can share with their peers, usually sports and video games work. I also introduce the concepts of butch and fem, and we identify topics and actions that are one or the other and practice saying things in a butch way.
It is really a lot of fun and so far has helped them avoid more teasing. Now this is of course completely different from making these kids straight. I have serious doubts that can be done, and none of these kids have identified themselves as gay. They are tired of being picked on, so that is what I help with.
And it is a hoot to do, we spend some time acting all queeny and all butch, it is one of the silliest and most enjoyable things I get to do at work.
We also practice dealing with mean people that has nothing to do with gender roles or efiminate behavior.
Trey
When someone says to "man up" in this context, it means to me: I want to exploit you so I can get some free shit.
Trey -
What is your profession, if you don't mind me asking?
That sounds like a very helpful thing you're doing for those kids. In the case of these boys with notably effeminate mannerisms, is there a particular home situation that they're coming from, i.e. no father at home and the like?
dunkel, I am a psychologist who does therapy. I cannot recall any particular pattern in their history associated with their being on the twee side.
I idly speculate that they might be gay, but none of them were old enough or interested enough to discuss their sexuality, so that was never discussed. The focus was just to help them fly more under the bully radar!
Trey
Unfortunately I forget the author, but I've seen some pretty good analysis that supports the idea that much of the college education gap may be arising from changes in the nature of degree programs, and their subject matter. To a large extent, there are more women in college because the purview of academia has extended to non-academic skills that are favored by women. Young men, in a similar cohort, are training outside of colleges at trade schools and such. So while there is a degree gap, there isn't such a stark education gap.
In Wyoming, they have the expression "cowboy up" which means if you fall off your horse, you get back on; when the going gets tough, the tough get going, etc. I like it over "man up" because I don't think it has the negative connotations of "man up" some of the commenters have mentioned. Plus, I happen to like cowboys!
Well, I have a very long meeting to conduct today, but I'll cowboy up and get 'er done!
Suzy, I'm in rural Oklahoma and 'cowboy up' gets used a lot here, and would be completely interchangeable with 'man up'.
I see it as an encouragement to be more stoic, to quit playing the victim card, to get over your anger and unhapiness about the inherent unfairness of life and get on with it.
More often than not, it is good advice, but it is precisely the type of man who can't be told to 'man up' without getting offended and having a hissy fit who is never going to be able to 'man up' in the first place.
I think a lack of mature attitudes are one of the things that plague both modern men's issues as well as the post-feminists. In many ways, for the modern male, manliness is not about being the opposite of a woman, but about being the opposite of a child.
Brett McKay over at Art Of Manliness posted a GREAT article on this subject last year. He says it better than I ever could:
http://artofmanliness.com/2010/05/16/what-is-manliness/
I don't know, Eric, that sounds fairly close to "don't ever complain as a man because I am going to shame you".
It can remain at "talk" at this point, but if legislators start passing laws putting ever more onerous burdens on men - while simultaneously pretending that everything is "equal" among the genders - then I would find a louder approach preferable. Also against people like you.
As I posted in the other thread, the WSJ has an op-ed by Hymowitz today based on the book: http://on.wsj.com/hw4xiS
Dr. Helen, it indeed looks like Kay "The Man-Hating Female Dog" Hymowitz is once again blaming it all on men. It's as if that ditz forgot what little she learned in "Love in the Time of Darwinism".
One of the ironies is that scolding men for not marrying makes the whole idea of marriage look like that much more of a drag.
As to whether men can be scolded into being more manly, I think that may be a hall of mirrors.
It should be borne in mind that many men resent being told what to do.
Captian Capitalism has a post on this.
http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/2011/02/accusing-men-of-immaturity-because-they.html
I listened to Kay Hymnowitz on the WSJ embedded video link. She is not a friend of men and since she does not understand the reasons for men avoiding marriage, her solutions are laughable. Rather than address the source, she laments the result.
It seems that female solutions are always to attempt to control men, or shame men into doing what women want. This is repackaged “woman as victim” baloney. Based on the video interview it seems she believes that “Women are deprived of good men because men are immature and won’t man up to fulfill a woman’s dreams, desires and destiny.”
Hymnowitz is selling horse crap in a pretty bag tied with a pink bow!
One of the funniest incidents of 35 years of surgery practice was one night when I overheard a conversation.
A nurse was on the phone with a friend in an obvious personal call. I was sitting in the surgery chart room, writing on patient charts. At a point in the conversation, which I had not been paying any attention to, she said to the other person, as if in surprise, "If you have a house, what do you need a man for ?"
I could hardly prevent myself from giggling and every time I would see her for months, I would giggle. What a revelation !
The title of Whitmire's book leaves me a little cold. If an academic were to write a book about the persistent gender gap in engineering, mathematics and many of the sciences, would anyone have dared to title it, "Why Girls Fail?" The very title of Whitmire's book seems to preclude the possibility that it's the educational system that might be failing boys rather than vice versa.
One elephant in the room missing from the discussion is the rise of the childfree. Increasing numbers of young men are deliberately foregoing fatherhood for any number of reasons (not just "selfish" lifestyle ones, but even a small minority who do so for deep philosophical ones too). Many of them will marry, of course (to childfree women), BUT..even were the divorce laws perfectly equitable for both men and women,why get married if you don't plan to have kids? (that's exactly what I did, for exactly the reasons I stated plus more). I also go one step further and eschew anything closer with non-related women than polite professional relationships. That further reduces the risk of being tied down in a relationship that - even w/o the divorce law unfairness - still involves surrendering total prerogatives over your mailing address, plus spending money, time, and effort on maintaining a relationship that may or may not last till death do us part.
Furthermore, on a personal note, I vehemently oppose the prevaling values and attitudes "picket-fence suburbia" forces upon us, namely image-consciousness, consumerism, "keep up with the Joneses", etc. In other words, the typical suburban kids, dogs, wife, and picket fence lifestlye is NOT the ultimate sign of success -- it's just MORE peer pressure to "be like everyone else or be 'dissed'" (sounds like High School 2.0, 3.0, etc!). I definitely don't want that and I certainly would not want to bring children into that lifestyle.
So it is that a life of child-free bachelorhood is more appealing than being a "responsible family man"
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