Author Topic: Book: "GUYLAND," The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men  (Read 2177 times)

Offline Aloysius J. Gleek

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Book: "GUYLAND," The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
« on: September 07, 2008, 09:56:26 am »

Masculinity, Kimmel tells us, is not biological or “hard-wired” but rather “coerced and policed relentlessly by other guys.” “Homophobia — the fear that people might misperceive you as gay — is the animating fear of American guys’ masculinity.”


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/books/review/Yang-t.html?ref=books&pagewanted=all


GUYLAND
The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
By Michael Kimmel
332 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $25.95


Nasty Boys



By WESLEY YANG
Published: September 7, 2008


The great question haunting our lifestyle journalists — are our daughters having healthy, empowering sex? — has an implicit counterpart: If not, are the emotionally misshapen men of their generation to blame? Michael Kimmel, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the author previously of the cultural history of “Manhood in America” and one of the leading lights of the emerging academic subfield known as men’s studies, has finally asked, and even tried to answer, that question, at book length.

Back in 1960, 77 percent of women and 65 percent of men under 30 had attained the five milestones that mark a transition to adulthood: “leaving home, completing one’s education, starting work, getting married and becoming a parent.” In 2000, those figures had declined to 46 percent of women and 31 percent of men. One-fifth of all 25-year-olds live with their parents. “The passage between adolescence and adulthood,” Kimmel concludes, “has ­morphed from a transitional moment to a separate life stage.”

Young middle-class white men feel the relative decline in their status particularly acutely, Kimmel argues. Their privileges are under siege. Women compete with them in the work force. Formerly deferential minorities demand respect. The values of consumption have eclipsed those of masculine production. And all of this new competition occurs in a context of general downward mobility. The response of these young white guys to such confusing conditions, Kimmel asserts, is to withdraw into a place he calls “Guyland.”

They move into communal housing with their college buddies. They work dead-end jobs. “The young have been raised in a culture that promises instant gratification,” he tells us. “The idea of working hard for future rewards just doesn’t resonate with them.” They play video games like Grand Theft Auto, in which the player’s avatar can have sex with a prostitute and recover his money by murdering her. They watch pornography in groups, “jiving with each other about what they’d like to do to the girl on the screen.” They “ ‘hook up’ occasionally with a ‘friend with benefits,’ go out with their buddies, drink too much and save too little.” They listen to violent rap music and to talk radio hosts who encourage their sense of “aggrieved entitlement” toward a world that has snatched away the masculine dominance they imagined would someday be theirs.

On the one hand, Kimmel tells us he is writing about the kind of children who “were rewarded for every normal developmental milestone as if they were Mozart.” On the other hand, these boys are all taught the “Guy Code” — a set of crude injunctions (“boys don’t cry,” “don’t get mad, get even,” “bros before hos,” “size matters”and so forth) whose “unifying emotional subtext . . . involves never showing emotions or admitting to weakness.” Meritocratic parents who strive to turn their ordinary progeny into gifted children do not teach the pitiless masculine creed of frontier America, but Kimmel uses both of these journalistic clichés to describe the same people when it serves his purpose.

Masculinity, Kimmel tells us, is not biological or “hard-wired” but rather “coerced and policed relentlessly by other guys.” “Homophobia — the fear that people might misperceive you as gay — is the animating fear of American guys’ masculinity.” High school is “a terrifying torment of bullying, gay-bashing and violence.” Later, he acknowledges that gay-straight alliances now exist at many high schools. This fact alone would suggest, as every other indication from the mainstream media does, that homophobia is a problem almost unimaginably reduced in virulence in the last decade.

In college, Kimmel tells us, guys are initiated into fraternities through “increasingly barbaric” hazing, in which “the cement of the brotherhood is blood, sweat and tears — and, apparently, vomit and semen.” (He describes here the fraternity hazing practice known as the “Ookie Cookie.”) Later, he acknowledges that we do not know if hazing is in fact a bigger problem than it used to be. “Even if it was worse back then, which it probably wasn’t, so what?” he asks. “The point is, of course, that standards change.”

No. The point is, Kimmel has tried to link fraternity initiations that may or may not be “increasingly barbaric” to the emergence of a supposedly new social formation, “Guyland,” that supposedly explains why men can’t grow up. If his description of that world is not accurate — if the violence, bullying, hazing and homophobia that he claims have gotten worse have in fact gotten better, or stayed the same — then we have to look elsewhere for explanations. We’ve had fraternities for a long time, and hazing deaths or gang rapes have occasionally occurred in them. But their graduates used to reach the five milestones of transition into adult life earlier than they do today. So what does the Ookie Cookie really tell us?

Kimmel has named a real sociological condition and described some of its broad outlines vividly. But he recapitulates too much lurid old news, like the Glen Ridge rape case and the Spur Posse, on the premise that such events “are only the furthest extremes of a continuum of attitudes and behaviors” that touch nearly all young men. This is true in a sense too trivial to be illuminating: it’s absurd to use the same cultural dynamics to explain both gang rape and sports talk radio. Kimmel asserts that the pressure to behave like a loutish Guylander is stronger now than ever before — a statement that the youth-extending urban hordes will recognize as absurd on its face.

For all this, “Guyland” bristles with excellent raw material. Kimmel has an ear for the telling quotation. Some are worth the price of admission all on their own:

“When I tell moms about the gender asymmetry of the oral sex ‘epidemic,’ for example, or what the hooking-up culture actually is like,” Kimmel writes, “they seem shocked at how predatory it is, how the sex seems so disconnected from anything resembling even liking the other person. The fathers, though, get jealous.” One man — the 48-year-old father of a 19-year-old boy — asks him to clarify: These guys are getting it on with, “like, different girls all the time and . . . the girls are willing to do that?” And “she doesn’t even expect him to call her — let alone, like, be her steady boyfriend? Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be 20 years younger.”

Kimmel closes his book with a heartfelt plea for parents to remain active in the lives of their “guys” and help them become mature, empathetic, ethical men. With fathers like that — good luck.

Wesley Yang writes about contemporary culture for Nextbook.org and n+1.
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Re: Book: "GUYLAND," The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
« Reply #1 on: September 08, 2008, 11:20:21 am »
Very interesting, friend John...and thought provoking.
"chewing gum and duct tape"