"With A Shout"

The Sorry Lives and Confusing Times of Today's Young Men

moochiethinks:

subtectummeum:

A really dispiriting thing to read. I want it to be different. What can we do?

I believe the men’s formation in FOCUS is excellent. There’s a start.

There is SO much in this article I want to quote! Please, everyone, just read this piece - it’s just excellent. VERY even-handed, laying blame in our society where it belongs in a difficult subject.

Don’t think it’s a difficult subject? It seriously is.

It’s the Pill:

“Bogle mentions the “unintended consequences of inventions” and posits that extended adolescence may be the accidental offspring of the Pill. The upper-class norm now, she says, is not to have kids until you’re in your 30s. The median age of male marriage keeps getting pushed further back—more than three years (which is an eon to sociologists) since 1980, to 28.2. That leaves young men with a long, long stretch of sowing wild oats—while young women tap their feet impatiently. (And not nearly as many people are marrying at all; in 1960, more than half of all 18-to-29-year-olds were wed; today, it’s around 20 percent.)”

It’s out Plugged-In Culture(tm):

“Bogle thinks Facebook may also be contributing to perpetual boyhood. Prior generations of men, she says, would leave their tight-knit communities of college friends, move to new cities, and become isolated. That made relationships with women more attractive, since women typically organized social life. “Now, Facebook makes it so easy to keep in touch with your old friends, to make plans and coordinate,” Bogle says.”

…

“Speaking of do-it-yourself, more than one academic cites porn as a reason young men are content to climb back into the family nest. “When I was a boy,” says Shaun Harper, a professor at Penn’s Graduate School of Education who studies how young men live and learn, “you had to work to find porn. And hide it! It was only available in an underground way.” Today, it’s as close as any website ending in .xxx. Researchers conducting a recent large study on porn and prostitution had trouble finding non-users to serve as a control group. An article in New York magazine last year described how young men have come to expect the “Porn Star Experience” from women, and find themselves faking orgasms when the real thing proves less satisfactory than the video version. No less than rock god John Mayer, whose girlfriends have included Jessica Simpson, Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift, told Playboy that he prefers masturbation to “real” sex: “Once I have to deal with someone else’s desires, I cut and run.” If you don’t even have to leave the house to find sexual ­gratification—much less put on a tie, make small talk and pay for dinner—why would you bother? That this forces young women to compete for men’s attention not just with one another but also with Jesse Jane and Lexi Belle explains a lot of contemporary ­evening wear.” (Emphasis in original.)

The article briefly touches on the ways this all has affected women, too. But it stops short of some of the negative effects women can experience. I’ve been actively looking for a girlfriend &, eventually, wife for the last year & a half. What I’ve been running into now makes sense to me in light of this article!

I found this very interesting:

“A few years back, a disgruntled ­co-ed told the New York Times she’d sworn off ­gamers for good because ‘they’re choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them.’”

This is the same behavior I’ve seen in women. Just as guys are using porn & video games to their detriment (in how it changes their expectations of women & totally wastes their time), women are using reality TV & a different kind of porn via internet chat room (not in the article but it was the focus of a piece I heard on NPR last week). I know so many women who are essentially addicted to Reality TV, every night of the week; but they constantly complain that there are no guys out there!

Excuse me! You can’t stay home living someone else’s life on The Bachelor/Bachelorette & expect to find a guy! And, just as the good girls aren’t gonna be sex camming with guys on the internet, the good guys aren’t in sex chat rooms. It works both ways!

The women I encounter don’t want to get out & live.

It’s 2 sides of the same coin!

Seriously … read this article. It’s fascinating. And spectacularly frightening!

Wow. Read this.