attitudes to childhood—the “war against boys”107 that Christina Hoff Summers has noted, and a more general tendency to keep children on an ever tighter chain—I wonder how much of that derives from the fact that “young moms” are increasingly middle-aged. Martha Stewart’s daughter seems a sad emblem of a world that insists one should retain time-honored traditions when decorating the house for Thanksgiving but thinks nothing of dismantling the most basic building blocks of society.
As always, conservatives fight these battles by playing catch-up: “gay marriage” is seen as a threat to “traditional marriage.” But, after the societal remaking of the last half-century, marriage is near kaput in most of the developed world, and hardly worth finishing off even in America. Rather, “gay marriage” offers a far more enticing target: today, a “family” is any living arrangement you happen to dig at that particular moment; a “marriage” is whatever tickles a California judge’s fancy; and along with these innovations proceeds the de facto and de jure abolition of “the sexes.” In his decision striking down California’s Proposition 8, the most significant of Judge Walker’s so-called “findings of fact” are about the elimination of sex, of male and female. After all, if a man can marry a man and raise a child, then the division of marital roles into “husband” and “wife” no longer applies, and the parental categories of “father” and “mother” are obsolete—“Parent One” and “Parent Two,” as the new U.S. passport form now puts it, or, in the friskier designations of Spanish birth certificates, “Progenitor A” and “Progenitor B.” And in that case in what sense do we still have “men” or “women”?
“The gender-neutral society is really a kind of experiment,” says Mansfield, himself adopting the prissy liberal usage of mutable “gender” rather than immutable “sex.” “It’s something that hasn’t been done before in human history.”108 If the aim is to create an androgynous people, then so far women are proving better at being men than men are at being women.
For the first time in American history, there are more women than men in the workplace, and they dominate the professions.109 The 2008 downturn accelerated the trend: the recession was for the most part a he-cession. There are more women than men at college: for 2009 graduates, the college enrollment rate was 73.8 percent for girls, 66 percent for boys.110 Almost 60 percent of Bachelor’s Degrees go to women.111 Speaking of bachelors, in 1980 the number of men who reached the age of forty without marrying were 6 percent of the population.112 A quarter-century later, they were 16.5 percent. How many by 2030? Currently some 55 percent of men aged 18 to 24 live with their parents.113 Even before the recession, more than half of all American college seniors moved back to the family home after graduation.114 Thirteen percent of American males (“men” doesn’t seem quite the word) aged 25 to 34 live with their parents.115
From time to time, many ambitious regimes find themselves minded, as Bertolt Brecht advised, to elect a new people. The immigration policies of most western nations seem intended to accomplish that goal. But you can also change the existing people, in elemental ways and over a surprisingly short space of time. Give me a boy till seven, said the Jesuits, and I will show you the man. Give me a boy till seventh grade, say today’s educators, and we can eliminate the man problem entirely.
Men are no longer hunter-gatherers, and have now ceased to be bread-winners. It isn’t such a bad deal. Though discriminated against in matters such as child support, the average male—if he retains enough of the wily survival instinct from the caveman days—can still have a pretty good time.
Most of these new-type gals still like a good old-fashioned shagging every now and again, and there’s no obligation to marry them anymore, or even pretend you’re dating seriously. You certainly don’t have to meet their parents, and, if the stork decides to spring a little unwanted surprise on you, there’s always your friendly local abortionist. After all, being “pro-choice” is a good way to show these babes what a sensitive new man you are.
So, even if constrained in all other rowdy boyish inclinations more or less since nursery school, guys are still free to abandon women in greater numbers than ever before. In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old white men were married. By 2000, it was 33 percent.116 The remainder don’t have wives, kids, homes—in the sense of mow-the-lawn wash-the-car paint-the-spare-bedroom homes. So what do they do? Well, they drink, they listen to music, they hook up, they lead teenage lives on an adult salary.
Males 18 to 34 years old play more video games than kids: according to a 2006 Nielsen survey, 48.2 percent of men in that demographic amused themselves in that way for an average of two hours and forty-three minutes every day—that’s thirteen minutes longer than the 12- to-17-year-olds.117
When these games were first produced, parents used to fret that they were taking boys away from baseball and tree-climbing and healthy outdoor activities. Now they’re taking men away from… what? their midlife crisis?
“For whatever reason,” concluded Kay Hymowitz in
As Gloria Steinem proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Today, in our feminized aquarium, we have all but eliminated the bicycle, save for a few rusting barnacle-encrusted spokes on the bottom. The full impact of our endlessly deferred adulthood is not yet known, although its contours can already be discerned. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In his book
Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square.
But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.
NO MAN’S LAND
“It is easier,” said Frederick Douglass, “to build strong children than to repair broken men.” But what if, as a matter of policy, we’re building our children to be broken men? And broken not just psychologically but biologically. Headline from the
Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for “Sperm count drops 25% in younger men”123 (
Do we still need sperm? Oh, a soupcon here and there still has its uses.
In 2009, a shortage of the stuff was reported in Sweden.124 There had been an unexpected surge in demand, from lesbian couples anxious to conceive.
So they headed off to the sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem of male inability to satisfy it. The problem seems to be higher than usual levels of non-functioning sperm. Even for a demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for a more poignant
H.G. Wells’ Time-Traveler writes of the softened Eloi:
It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a
