A few exceptions notwithstanding, it never fails that when you have a woman writing for a newspaper about the State of the American Male (SAM), it will be astoundingly hypocritical. Kay Hymowitz didn't waste any time in jumping right into this cookie-cutter by offering this picture which is, not coincidentally, two sides of the same coin:
With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order, hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining with friends. Single young males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3 and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it's receding.
One has to wonder whether or not she has actually stepped outside of the professional circle that writers and journalists run in to notice that there are still plenty of men who are achieving just fine, and men still dominate the fields which matter like engineering, medicine and law. You are not likely to see a strong gravitation to journalism from men who are prone to actually thinking for themselves and holding firmly to their own ideas and identities because of the overwhelming left-wing group think that dominates the mainstream outlets. Should it then be a surprise that any man who doesn't fancy himself a herd animal would avoid such fields?
Notice that it is perfectly fine for women to make material consumption a hobby, to constantly travel and hang out with friends with impunity, but similar leisure habits are verboten for men. Even the most prodigious video gamer's budget probably pales in comparison to the amount of money that these women that she is writing about spend shopping, traveling to the well-beaten paths of the world and eating out. With both of these generalizations, we are a far cry from the ideal that Hymowitz has from the responsible halcyon days of 1965.
Speaking of irony and hypocrisy, she laments the responsibility of white men in 1965, and their former willingness to commit, but conveniently ignores the fact that white liberals were building a welfare state in that same era which paved the way for the destruction of black family life.
That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women get a kick out of child-men
and their frat/fart jokes. But for many, the child-man is either an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak. In contemporary female writing and conversation, the words "immature" and "men" seem united in perpetuity.
We keep hearing such groaning laments about the SAM, but what about the State of the American Woman (SAW)? If American men are subconsciously thinking American woman, stay away from me American woman, mama let me be, at least insofar as it relates to marriage and commitment, chances are it has much to do with the SAW, not a resurgence in the popularity of The Guess Who.
There are a few things we do know about the SAW, and one of which is that American women are laid back about commitment, but not so good at actually keeping up with it. With as many as seventy two percent of all divorces being initiated by women, it's a bit specious to argue that women have their end of the deal figured out. It's all well and good to say that men should man up and take responsibility, but then men don't get the consolation prizes in the divorce courts that women routinely get for making an effort so half-assed at commitment that even a public school teacher would be forced to give it a failing grade in red ink.
Modern men are stuck between the SAW and a fun place: booze, drugs, video games, guns, nice cars and working only for themselves. This is only complicated by the sheer number of women who fancy themselves, even partly in jest, to be princesses or goddesses. I suppose in fairness, in the event that paganism ever becomes mainstream in America, many families will be able to save money by counting every purchase from Godiva or Starbucks as an offering to the household god(dess), provided it is ordered with the right sort of supplication.
Granted the greatest flaw in the SAW is the belief that a woman can have it all--and enjoy it. There can be little doubt that a woman can have a family and a career, but the question is, will she enjoy it? Often the answer is that she won't, and one of the components of having it all will have to suffer so that she can enjoy herself and feel fulfilled. Can you guess which one it is?
Marriage being a traditional role for men, it is only fair that men get to expect that if they are going to be forced to be a husband, that they get many of the things that used to come with it. Unfortunately, for men, this is an infringement on the autonomy of the normal marriage-minded woman, something which cannot be even asked of her, let alone stated as an outright condition of getting married in the first place. After all, only a cad would tell a woman that he fully expects her to give up her career and focus on the children that she wants.
It's also worth noting too that many men seem to actually be paying attention to the divorce issues and learning from them. For many men, the map of life has a dark land that makes Mordor look like a romp through Disney World, marked "here be harpies, vampires and man-eating legal eagles."
Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature come to be? The most prevalent
theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles.
Female empowerment is largely a way of saying that they have the backing of major institutions to insulate them from pressures common to men while they build themselves up. Here's a thought experiment for the skeptical reader. Get a highly intelligent, educated man who is a high achiever to roundly diss a woman of lesser intelligence and education in the office so badly that she storms out crying. Reverse the roles. Who gets fired? Who gets supported? Who gets laughed at? "Female empowerment" is the corporate equivalent of releasing a house cat onto the African Savannah, putting a team of crack shots off in the distance behind it, and having them discretely protect it from the predators and shoot-to-wound prey, all while letting it become sure of itself as a fearsome predator that instills terror into the hearts of lesser animals. There are women who by nature are fully capable of traversing a male-dominated world on its terms, but these are not the sort of women who have ever really needed "female empowerment" anyway.
There are men who are afraid of women who are more intelligent and bolder than they are. There are more men who are afraid of confronting women in the workplace, academia and government because to do so can be job, or even career, suicide if not done with the finesse of a ballerina crossing a flaming bed of nails.
(I'd like now to mention, just to jam the stake into this feminist nosferatu a little harder, that I am 24, happily married to a woman who makes more money than I do right now, a video gamer and a software engineer.)