On the positive side, many of these organizations teach men how to work together with other men, which is crucial to the fabric of society. Yet over time, that degree of social intensity becomes a set point of desirable functioning, operating at an unconscious level of awareness. Men experience a sense of social isolation and then boredom immediately following their separation from such socially intense male group settings, such as having to participate in groups of men and women or family settings. Men may experience withdrawal symptoms when removed from such socially intense group settings; symptoms are greater the longer and more intense the prior duration of their all-male group participation has been.
This phenomenon peaks on days with important sports matches, such as the World Cup Final or Super Bowl Sunday, when many males would rather be in a bar with strangers, watching a totally suited-up Tom Brady, the New England Patriots' star quarterback, than with a totally naked Kim Kardashian in their bedroom. The popular porn site PornHub recently released a report confirming this occurrence. During Superbowl XLVIII, traffic to their site dramatically decreased while the event was taking place, especially in Denver and Seattle, the two cities whose teams were competing for the championship. After the game there was a noticeable spike in traffic across the US and Canada, and a smaller spike in worldwide traffic.4
This hidden desire to be an alpha male or part of the “guy thing” is double-edged, however. For young, straight men, it must not become too intimate and personal for fear of seeming feminine or gay, or throwing off the cohesion or morale of the group. So that enforces a rule of superficiality and of physical distance with other guys, except for high-fives, mid-air shoulder bumping, and slaps across the back. As one Infantryman told us:
The emotional distance between guys is one that resides in the context of warrior societies or the fighting classes. Men will communicate to other men that they care but that there is a fine line that emotions cannot cross. This is anchored in several concepts: among peers, men are their own individual being, and are not to be influenced by anything but their own logic. Men don't go to war because someone convinced them to; they go to war because they know it is right. Men's friendships among peers in competitive atmospheres are based on what abilities they bring to the group; remembering that their life is devalued but their skillsets are not. Showing concern means that you question their ability in that competition and have compromised the dynamic of the group, or fear for their performance level, which pits them against the team as a whole. Lastly, it strikes too similarly to the concerns of a woman's nagging.
It is possible to generate some interesting predictions of potential behavioral consequences for men with high SIS levels. They might respond to the negative effect of disengagement from such groups by partaking in arousing activities, such as high-risk hobbies or behaviors, arguments and fights, drinking to excess, developing strange or rigid eating habits, gambling, and speeding. They may also develop unfavorable comparisons between men and women. They will spend more time in symbolic male groups, such as watching sports in a sports bar or even engaging in fantasy football or baseball competitions, and are unable to find common ground with women. They do not have many, if any, female friends.
Texting is often an exclusive form of communication of this crowd. Not only is it convenient, but it also allows them to passively communicate on their terms. New apps like BroApp—which sends prescheduled texts to a girlfriend or partner—take the trend to a whole new level. The creators offered this explanation on their site: “BroApp is a tool to help Bros out. We know that people are busy and sometimes forget to send enough love to their partners. We invented BroApp so that even if you forget to manually write a message, your love is still communicated. BroApp provides seamless relationship outsourcing.”5 If Easy Cheese were an app, it might look like BroApp—it vaguely resembles the real thing, but there's something a bit . . . off. Actually, a lot off. Why have a relationship at all if you can't even bring yourself to text a simple “I love you” or “Thinking of you?”
For some, there is even memory distortion with greater recall of positive aspects and poorer recall of negative aspects of their time in those previous male-bonding groups.
Members of the military sometimes deal with the arousal deficit by seeking redeployment or hanging around settings where there are likely to be other men who also belong to such high-intensity groupings, such as soldiers hanging around VA hospital lobbies. Nonmilitary men who are sports fans may become team “fanatics.”
Poor bonding with family and spouse also characterize SIS. These men are more likely to abuse their spouse, especially when drinking, and more likely to become divorced or separated from partners with whom they had a positive relationship prior to deployment or team membership. They are also likely to develop generally negative attitudes toward women as “the other” who do not understand them, and prefer porn, sex with prostitutes, or generally unhealthy energy-intensive relationships with little foreseeable reward to consensual and sustainable sexual relationships with equal-status female partners.
Paradoxically, then, males can get used to a certain level of generalized stimulation from being in the presence of other men in group settings, yet acknowledging feelings of intimacy from these settings is forbidden. When they are in coed settings, they may become socially anxious, and then, when they are presented with the prospect of intimacy with a woman, the opposite response can occur: they may fail to get sexually aroused. More than a third of young military servicemen reported experiencing erectile dysfunction in a recent study.6 Other recent studies had similar findings among nonmilitary youth, with rates showing a marked increase after high speed Internet porn became widespread.7
Worldwide, there are similar phenomena. In Japan, young men are increasingly apathetic to sex. Even married couples have less sex. The Japan Family Planning Association recently reported that the number of young men aged sixteen to nineteen who have no interest in sex is now more than one in three, double the estimate from 2008, and four out of ten marriages have been sexless for a month or more.8 The phenomenon is so common that these men have been given a name: soshoku danshi, or “herbivorous men,” in contrast to carnivorous men, who are still interested in sex. One particularly poignant response to our survey came from a young male student at Bard College in New York:
I must admit that I haven't had one real physical relationship in my entire life. I'm a complete extrovert who has a core group of [male] friends along with a whole bunch of other friends [including some women] but has always been rather unsure when it comes to women. I feel like I can't really interact with them, and end up treating them like men, which makes them my friend but not someone who is a romantic interest . . . I would definitely rather hang out with my friends and enjoy the company of a small group of guy friends where we hang out and relax.
Another young man commented on our forum after reading The Demise of Guys:
It hits close to me because I grew up without a father, spent a lot of time playing video games as a teenager, and was addicted to porn. When I turned 18, I joined the Army and became an Infantryman. The infantry is a very tight-knit brotherhood. I deployed to Afghanistan in 09–[2010]. Now that I'm out of the Army, I find myself missing the camaraderie a lot, even hoping for another war to break out so I have an excuse to re-enlist. I have trouble in school and find it hard to focus. I'm socially awkward, shy, and not very successful with women. I don't live at home anymore though, I have two female roommates but I still feel isolated, lonely, and depressed even to the point of suicide sometimes. I am 22 years old and trying to change my life. I see the effects that these things have had on my life . . . I feel as men, our environment is changing and we're in this transition phase but the old rules still apply. Therefore those of us stuck in the middle are just screwed over.
We wish his story wasn't as common as it is, but many of the veterans that Sarah Brunskill and I (Phil) interviewed shared similar experiences. You can learn more about the scale that
measures the different aspects of SIS in Appendix II.
FOUR
Excessive Gaming
Mastering the Universe from Your Bedroom
What if somebody out there develops a magic formula, a better place for humans to be? Why would anyone stay here?
—Edward Castronova, professor of telecommunications, Indiana University Bloomington1
In the late 1960s, if you wanted to connect a computer up to a video screen, you could do it at only a handful of places, and you had to be one of only a few people that had access to this sort of technology. Things have changed quite a bit in the last fifty years. There is an assumption that the more time we devote to the Internet the less time we spend watching television, but statistics reveal the opposite. Europeans are spending just as much time in front of a TV as they ever have, and Americans now spend sixty hours a week across an average of four digital devices, the majority owning high-definition televisions (HDTVs), computers, tablets, and smartphones. Complementing these devices are more choices for how and when people access content.2 In addition, Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, California, estimates people spend a collective 3 billion hours playing video games each week! She predicts that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by the time they reach age twenty-one.3 To put this figure in context, it takes the average university student half that time—4,800 hours—to earn a bachelor's degree.4
Some gamers are females, there is no doubt; and video game companies are very aware of this. (Farm Ville, World of Warcraft or Mario Kart, anyone?) Still, young women don't play nearly to the extent that young men do—only five hours per week compared to guys' thirteen.5 For many young men, thirteen hours a day can also become habitual.
There are also differences in how young women and men play games. Young women primarily play games on smartphones and tablets; games that are short (such as Words with Friends) and nonviolent, whereas guys are playing immersive first-person shooter games on consoles or computers that require a keyboard and mouse and have a much larger time commitment. Some journalists are trying to convince people that women are just as into gaming as guys, but it's misleading. The 10,000 hours figure is the average of young men and young women, and since guys play almost triple the amount, the hours spent gaming by age twenty-one is probably more like 14,400 hours for young men versus 5,600 hours for young women. Girls' interest in gaming generally tapers off by their teenage years where as boys' interest increases.6
And, like porn, when it comes to actually designing the games, paying for games, and competing for prizes, guys outnumber the girls. Young men are also more likely than young women to have access to a gaming console (91 percent versus 70 percent)7 and have a computer in their bedroom (62 percent versus 49 percent), and consequently spend less time reading, less time on academic tasks, and more time engaged in an on-screen activity.8
One month after its release in 2010, Call of Duty: Black Ops had been collectively played for 68,000 years.9 In 2012 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 made $500 million in sales in its first twenty-four hours, and in 2013 more than 8,300 stores in North America had midnight openings to help Grand Theft Auto 5—one of the most controversial game series of all time—rack up $800 million in its first day.10 Grand Theft Auto 5 surpassed the $1 billion mark after only three days, faster than any movie in history, including any of the Harry Potter films and Avatar.11
In 2013 the worldwide revenue of the gaming industry, including mobile games played on smartphones and tablets, was $66 billion, a $3 billion increase from 2012.12 Compare these numbers with the US Department of Education's annual discretionary appropriations budget of $68.8 billion in 201313 or the size of the entire US publishing industry, which in 2010 had net sales revenue of $27.9 billion.14 Game Informer, a monthly magazine featuring news, strategies, and reviews on video games, was ranked the third-largest magazine in the United States by circulation in 2013. The only two above it were AARP The Magazine and AARP Bulletin,15 which are usually free for older and retired Americans.
When fifteen-year-old Steve Juraszek of Illinois set the world record for the arcade game Defender in 1981, he became an instant celebrity and had his picture taken for Time magazine. He played for sixteen hours straight.16 Today games not only test a player's skill, they test the player's bodily limits for intense duration. There are gamers like George Yao, who play online games like Clash of Clans for forty-eight hours straight. Yao even took iPads covered in plastic into the shower in order to continue playing and stay ranked number one.17
There are many other (mostly young) people who log thousands of hours in a single game just for the chance to pursue a professional gaming career and compete fiercely in televised tournaments for million-dollar-plus prizes.18 Marathon gaming has become so common there is even a term for the hazy, sleep-deprived state a gamer must endure on their third night of uninterrupted play: Valley of Death.19 For the ordinary gamer a sixteen-hour stretch would be just another typical weekend, and few parents would even bat an eyelid. Two-thirds of children and teens report that their parents have “no rules” regarding their media consumption, and the majority continue to play games and use other electronic devices after the lights are out.20
According to the Sleep Center at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), teens need an average of nine hours of sleep each night to be alert and well rested the next day.21 Most teens don't get even close to this much. In the National Sleep Foundation's 2014 Sleep in America Poll, parents estimated their thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds got 7.7 hours of sleep each night while their fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds got just 7.1 hours;22 these estimates are probably high considering that kids themselves report staying up past their bedtime. Interestingly, because they share similar symptoms, a lack of sleep is often confused with having ADHD, and some teens are thought to have ADHD when instead they actually have a sleep problem.23 Kids who have at least one electronic device in their room also get one less hour of sleep per night than kids who don't.24
Colin Kinney, a teacher from Ireland, observed some students would spend nights gaming and come to class with such limited attention spans that “they may as well not be there.” He added, “I have spoken to a number of nursery teachers who have concerns over the increasing numbers of pupils who can swipe a screen but have little to no manipulative skills to play with building blocks or the like, or the pupils who cannot socialize with other pupils but whose parents talk proudly of their ability to use a tablet or smart phone.”25 We are talking about nursery-age children—three to five years old!
These problems continue beyond adolescence. In marriages where just one partner is a gamer, it is the husband 84 percent of the time. In the other couples where both spouses play but one person plays more than the other, it is the husband 73 percent of the time.26
Back in the early 1980s Duke University researchers started following several men who had become obsessed with gaming just before their respective marriages. After watching the men's game time quadruple—one man taking his fiancée on dates to watch him play, and another putting off leaving for his honeymoon to play just a few more games—the researchers made the assertion that marriage was both the cause and cure for the “Space Invaders Obsession.” They wrote that “the disintegration of invading aliens who were trying to overrun ‘home base’ took on symbolic significance.”27
Today, there are support groups online for “gamer widows,” where the partners of gamers can share their frustrations. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) are especially absorbing because a player can become anybody in the virtual world, attaining looks, acceptance, wealth, and status that are elusive in real life for most people without hard work, education, and social connections. “They aren't just better looking,” said one gamer widow, “they are ‘better’ people.”28
Even if games were originally designed to inspire players and make a better reality, they are now being used to replace reali
ty, and many young men are losing themselves in increasingly sophisticated virtual worlds that are totally enchanting. As one decade-long gamer from our survey said, “I can't emphasize enough the predictability and control that a virtual world offers. In a world growing ever more complex, the simplicity of the virtual life is a very welcome distraction.”
FIVE
Becoming Obese
Today, roughly 70 percent of adult males in the US are overweight,1 and a third are obese.2 Though some countries are less flabby than others, obesity is a worldwide problem. Roughly a quarter of Australian, British, Canadian, German, Polish, and Spanish men are obese.3 “It's going up everywhere,” says Christopher Murray, director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington-Seattle. He said he used to be optimistic that there would be some success stories that would serve as models, but found that there was not a single country that has seen a decrease in obesity in the past three decades.4 So we are dealing with a worldwide epidemic.
Americans, perhaps the most vocal in their antiobesity crusade, sabotage their own efforts by taking two steps back for every step forward. Ridiculous portion sizes, “all you can eat” buffets at family restaurants, fast food drive-thrus on nearly every busy street corner, the sedentary nature of many jobs, changing modes of transportation, and increasing urbanization combine to create a “fat ass” nation. In addition, we are teaching our children terrible habits. American schools are currently selling 400 billion calories of junk food every year—the equivalent of nearly 2 billion chocolate bars.5 Twenty-one percent of elementary schools, 62 percent of middle schools and 86 percent of high schools have vending machines, while just 20 percent of middle schools and 9 percent of high schools offer healthy snacks only.6
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