In her book, The War Against Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, described even more imbalances. She said that girls not only outnumber boys in student government, honor societies, and after school clubs, but they also do more homework, read more books, and outperform boys in the arts and in musical abilities. Meanwhile, more boys are suspended from school and more are held back from advancing to the next grade level. Simply put, girls are more “engaged” academically.11
More boys than girls are coming to school unprepared—without books, paper and pencil, or their homework.12 Twice as many boys think school is a “waste of time” and arrive at class late.13 Predictably, students with the lowest test scores who came to school unprepared outnumbered the unprepared high-scoring students more than two to one.14
The top reason for disability filings for children is now mental illness, “representing half of all claims filed in 2012, compared to just 5 to 6 percent of claims twenty years prior,” says child psychiatrist Victoria Dunckley.15 Rates of ADHD diagnoses increased 5 percent every year between 2003 and 2011; boys are between two to three times more likely than girls to have ever been diagnosed in their lifetime,16 and therefore are more likely to be prescribed stimulants, such as Ritalin, even in primary school.
On top of this, boys are far more likely to drop out of school.17 The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) notes the ripple effects of this trend:
Dropouts ages 25 and older reported being in worse health than adults who are not dropouts, regardless of income . . . Dropouts also make up disproportionately higher percentages of the nation's prison and death row inmates. Comparing those who drop out of high school with those who complete high school, the average high school dropout is associated with costs to the economy of approximately $240,000 over his or her lifetime in terms of lower tax contributions . . . higher rates of criminal activity, and higher reliance on welfare.18
The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a study that began in 1997 and ended in 2012, found that by twenty-seven years old a third of women had received bachelor's degrees compared with one out of four men.19 By 2021, in the US it is estimated that women will get 58 percent of bachelor's degrees, 62 percent of master's degrees and 54 percent of PhDs.20 Abroad there are similar trends. In Canada and Australia, 60 percent of university graduates are women.21 Fewer than three boys apply to university in England for every four girls who do, and in Wales and Scotland, 40 percent more girls apply than boys,22 a gap that widens among those from disadvantaged backgrounds.23
Two-thirds of students in special education remedial programs are boys. It's not a question of IQ—young men are just not putting in the effort, and it translates into a lack of career options. These gaps are much greater for males from minority backgrounds: only 34 percent of college bachelor's degrees awarded to black students go to black men, and 39 percent of bachelor's degrees awarded to Hispanic students go to Hispanic men.24
It is obvious to us that it is time for a loud wake-up call, to be sounded in every nation around the world where young males are failing to perform adequately in academic domains. The consequences for them, their families, their communities, and even national destinies could be catastrophic unless dramatic corrective actions are taken soon.
TWO
Men Opting Out of the Workforce
Where has the Protestant work ethic gone these days in the minds of young men? In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the percentage of American teens and those in their early twenties who participated in the workforce dropped dramatically;1 and male employment between the ages of twenty-five and fifty-four has declined steadily since the late 1960s.2 Around the world there are similar trends,3 which means millions of men are not working.
The growing interconnectedness of the world's economies means that modern boom and bust cycles have further and deeper reaching consequences for all nations. The global recession of 2009 was the worst recession since the Second World War, causing male unemployment to double. Half of the 6.5 million US jobs lost since the most recent recession were in manufacturing and construction4 and many of those kinds of jobs aren't coming back.5 Manufacturing industries that de-emphasize manual and technical skills in favor of technological advances—such as the car industry—mean that many developed countries no longer make things, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty for many men. Even having a higher degree is no guarantee of employment.
Health care—a major female-dominated industry—was relatively insulated. Personal care and home health aides are projected to be the fastest-growing occupations, and women are predicted to fill a large portion of these new jobs.6 So while this new landscape of opportunities offers a bright future for many young women, it offers a rather grim harvest for bright young men, compared to what would have been available to them only a generation or two ago.
But there's more—an entitlement curse. Although the adverse state of the Western economy has contributed to fewer men in the workforce, a highly educated female colleague alerted us to a new phenomenon. Some males now feel a sense of total entitlement simply because they exist as males. And they do not have to do anything to earn that special privilege. Many now seek long-term shelter either with Mom and Dad or within their marriages or relationships with a live-in partner. A surprising amount of men don't seem to want to work at jobs that will bring in money or even help out with household chores that will keep their living space tidy. One out of six men of prime working age who are not working willingly admit they don't want a job,7 and nearly half said the jobs that are available are beneath them or don't pay enough to “improve their lives”8 These guys are content just to hang around doing “their thing” but perform nothing that traditionally resembles work.
Some of these men have even reframed dependency to make it look like an accomplishment and not a social failure, and they feel it is their right to absent themselves from having to make money or do drudgery around the house. In a sense, they are like old-fashioned gigolos, attractive men who were taken care of by older women in return for being charming dates or sexual adventurers, except this new breed of males want it all while giving little in return. Consider a couple of the vignettes that our colleague shared with us:
A physical therapist I know married a guy who basically quit his job once they got married. She did all the work and all the housework. She would come home after a long day at work, schlepping her heavy equipment through the rain, and he would not even come out to help her carry anything. When she got in, he would ask her what was for dinner, and she would have to go back out to the store and come home and cook. He sat on his ass all day and did nothing. Nice guy, handsome, but did not work or want to work. She divorced him after four years of marriage.
Another academic I know gets together with this guy who quits his job to go back to graduate school. He incurs a $100,000 debt and is not able to get a steady job. She supports him although he is not willing to get married nor help with any house chores.
Why do women stick it out with such guys? Even their mothers might call them slackers. As we'll explore in more depth in Chapter 20, the depressing alternative for these well-educated women appears to be no man at all, so they stick with their bad decision until it gets so unbearable that they decide to dump the deadbeat.
In the years following my (Phil's) Demise of Guys TED Talk, many talented and attractive young women came up to me at my various lectures around the world and shared their experiences. These professional women in their midtwenties to early forties all echoed the same theme: it is difficult to find a man of similar age and with a similar background to theirs who knows how to carry on a basic social conversation or understands the social etiquette of interpersonal communication with a new acquaintance where there appears to be some social attraction.
The standard script is the guy describes in great detail his background, his current job, the new app he is working on or new website he plan
s to develop, and then he glazes over, maybe orders a drink, or worse, pulls out his phone mid-conversation and stars checking his emails and texts. There is no hint that he wants the woman to share her personal or professional story. “And what about you?” They don't ask.
When I first lectured on the topic, my focus was on young guys in their teens and early twenties. These women agreed that it starts there and snowballs. Whatever the cause, the cure is obvious: men who want to attract, date, and maybe even mate with women in their common talent pool have to learn how to talk with them. They need to take time to practice being social animals, to be more sociocentric, and be able to find common ground.
Aside from not understanding that all relationships involve a negotiation of rights and obligations, what this entitlement suggests to us is the abandonment of a sense of having to work for anything. The stigma of unemployment still exists, but isn't even close to what it used to be. These men don't make the connection between responsibility, paying dues, and success. Some of them don't care. Others are acting as if one gets what one wants just by being at the front of the line when the doors open or the party starts.
A young man told us this in his survey comments:
It is my belief that entitlement can help shape men. What they are entitled to is responsibility. The achievement is fulfillment of responsibility that will let the world trust them to shape the future. Yes, men can be strong if they care about others. Responsibilities—such as being gentle and a gentleman, manners to others to show courtesy, to take on duties to reassure others, being selfless-will help a young man find himself . . . The key to being a man lies in responsibility. The responsibility to care about oneself and not ruin or abuse oneself, to care about others and not ruin or abuse them.
We could not agree more. But it seems to us that this new sense of male entitlement is different from what it may have been in the past. It is more generalized, spreading to more settings and activities that tend to undermine any meaningful social or romantic relationships. These men seem to be emulating successful media celebrities and personalities such as basketball star Michael Jordan, actor Ashton Kutcher or entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, who appear to have it all; but they see and admire only the desirable outcomes and products. What is missing from the analysis is any appreciation of what goes into any kind of success: a lot of hard work, trial and tribulation, practice and failures that are part of the process of trying to attain a goal. The good things in life usually take a commitment to success, to delaying gratification, to putting work before play, and to understanding the importance and vitality of the social contract—not expecting more than what is being put in.
THREE
Excessive Maleness
Social Intensity Syndrome (SIS)
Shyness plays a key role in the complex causal cycle between the self-imposed social isolation of many young men and their excessive time spent on watching porn and gaming.
Traditionally shyness implied a fear of rejection by being socially unacceptable to certain social groups or individuals, such as authorities, or those a person wished to impress, such as members of the opposite sex. In the 1970s and 1980s when I (Phil) pioneered the scientific study of shyness among adolescents and adults, about 40 percent of the US population rated themselves as currently shy people, or dispositionally shy. An equal percentage reported that they had been shy in the past but had overcome its negative impact. Fifteen percent more said that their shyness was situationally induced, such as on blind dates or having to perform in public. So only 5 percent or so were true-blue never-ever shy.
Over the past thirty years, however, that percentage has increased. In a 2007 survey of students by the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast, 84 percent of participants said they were shy at some point in their life, 43 percent said they were presently shy, and just 1 percent said they had never been shy. Two-thirds of those who were currently shy said that their shyness was a personal problem.1 The deep fear of social rejection has risen in part as a result of technology, which minimizes direct, face-to-face social interaction such as conversing with other people, seeking information, shopping, going to the bank, getting library books, and much more. The net does it all for us faster, more accurately, and without any need for making social connections. In one sense, online communication enables the very shy to make easier contact with others in the realm of asynchronistic communication. However, we believe it then makes it more difficult to make real-life connections. As one of the researchers, Bernardo Carducci, noted:
. . . changes in technology are affecting the nature of interpersonal communication so that we are experiencing more structured electronic interactions and less spontaneous social interactions where there is the opportunity to develop and practice interpersonal skills, such as negotiating, making conversation, reading body language and facial cues, which are important for making new friends and fostering more intimate relationships.2
The new breed of shyness then arises not from wanting to reach out but fearing social rejection from making a poor impression, but, rather, not wanting to make social contact because of not knowing how to, and then further distancing oneself from others the more out of practice one gets. Thus, this new shyness gets continually reinforced, internalized, and, worse, not even recognized when it leads to the absence of contact with most other people. Thus, many shy people behave awkwardly or inappropriately with peers, superiors, in unfamiliar situations, and in one-on-one opposite-sex interactions.
Aside from the steady increase in shyness, what is different today is that shyness among young men is less about a fear of rejection and more about fundamental social awkwardness—not knowing what to do, when, where, or how. Most young men used to know how to dance. Now they don't even know where to look for common ground, and they wander about the social landscape like tourists in a foreign land, unable and unwilling to ask for directions. Many of them don't know the language of face contact, the nonverbal and verbal set of rules that enable a person to comfortably talk with and listen to somebody else and get them to respond back in kind. This lack of social skills surfaces most especially when around desirable females.
The absence of such critical social skills, essential to navigating intimate social situations, encourages a strategy of retreat, going fail-safe. Girls and women equal likely failure; safe equals the retreat into online and fantasy worlds that, with regular practice, become ever more familiar, predictable, and, in the case of video games, more controllable. A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world shrinks to the size of a young man's bedroom. In this way, we can say that shyness is both a cause of the problem as well as one of the consequences of excessive gaming and porn use. As one young man from our survey commented:
I play video games and watch pornography on a regular basis . . . but I've always been average looking and I've hated the tiresome aspect of having to make the effort to appease the opposite sex. It's expensive, confusing and rarely successful. I feel like the personal relationships with any girl/woman I've known have meant nothing to me and can be easily substituted with male company whilst pornography fills the rest.
Bros before Hoes: Social Intensity Syndrome (SIS)
In the film My Fair Lady (based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion), lead actor Rex Harrison has just achieved his successful transformation of a poor flower-shop girl into a stunningly beautiful and sophisticated woman, played by Audrey Hepburn. When she becomes distressed that he fails to show her any affection or even recognition for all she has done to modify her entire being so dramatically, and hints that she would perhaps like a bit of romance as well, he rudely dismisses her. Harrison then sings a song of lament to his friend, Pickering: “Why can't a woman be more like a man?”3
In doing so, he reveals what we believe is actually a common set of attitudes and values held by a good portion of men: a
deep preference for male company and bonding over association or partnership with women.
A more modern-day example of this attitude can be seen in the 1999 romantic comedy, She's All That, starring Freddie Prinze Jr. and Rachael Leigh Cook. After Zack's (Prinze) popular but self-absorbed girlfriend dumps him for a reality television star, Zack finds comfort in convincing himself she can be replaced by any girl in his high school. One of his jock friends disagrees and makes him a bet that he can't turn the unpopular art nerd girl Laney (Cook) into prom queen within six weeks. After repeated attempts to charm her and convince her that his efforts are not part of some “dork outreach program,” Laney steps into Zack's world and allows his sister to give her a makeover, revealing her hidden beauty. Only after her outward transformation does he become attracted to her and develop genuine feelings.
Along with co-researchers Sarah Brunskill and Anthony Ferreras, Phil has labeled this phenomenon Social Intensity Syndrome (SIS). Similar to “laddism” in the UK, the key dimensions of this “excessive maleness” are outlined as follows: having a strong preference for social settings that involve the ubiquitous presence of other men. The attraction to this social setting is greater the more intense the nature of the relationship, the more exclusive it is toward tolerating “outsiders” or those who have not qualified for that group membership, and the more embedded each man is perceived to be within that group. Examples of such social groups include the military—especially during boot camp and deployment— gangs, physical contact sports (i.e., American football, rugby), “gym rats,” and fraternities. Men experience a positive arousal—such as cortisol, adrenergic system activation, or an increase in testosterone—when they feel they are part of such all-male social groups. Men gradually adapt to that level of social intensity as the preferred form of social contact.
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