Yesterday I posted some of Kay Hymowitz's (author: Manning Up: How The Rise Of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys) WSJ article, Where Have The Good Men Gone? in which she argues that too many men in their 20s are living in a new kind of extended adolescence - there is also an NPR conversation with her and masculinity author Michael Kimmel in that post.A lot of guys object to her views - especially the heterocentric view that manhood and masculinity are defined by marriage and raising children. Many men, including straight men like me (and especially bi, gay, or transmen) do not define themselves that way.
Bonnie Erbe refutes many of Hymowitz's arguments in a new article.
Read the whole article.Boys, girls and how they mature
Published: Tuesday, March 1, 2011Commentary: I'm not going to disagree that generations of Americans have been slacking off when compared with their elders. But that started a long, long time ago.
Author Kay S. Hymowitz is once again stirring the pot on gender issues, this time staking a claim in the gender swap discussion. In a Wall Street Journal essay, Hymowitz weighs in on whether girls are now becoming women more quickly than boys are becoming men, and placing more of the blame on the XY gender than on the double-x crowd.
She starts out by explaining women are earning more college degrees with higher GPAs than men and so have surpassed them in education. She claims young women, “also have more confidence and drive.” They are more likely to go to graduate school and climb the corporate ladder, and in some major cities even out-earn their male
counterparts.
Rash generalizations are always tricky and Hymowitz's, while artfully put, is no different. Make one and you're asking for others to poke holes in it. Nonetheless, Hymowitz paints a mass portrait of 20-something men getting drunk and sitting in front of their PlayStations, while 20-something women get great jobs and make families on their own.
“Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.”
Whoa, Nellie, or rather, Kay. I'm not going to disagree that generations of Americans have been slacking off when compared with their elders. But that started a long, long time ago.
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