Some of you might have heard of this book, but I decided to set up this thread where we could discuss what it is like being a 20-something guy in today's world.
Dude, where's my manhood? | Salon Books
Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland" | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com
So guys, do you feel this book is spot on?
Ladies, are you concerned about the future of the male species? As in, would some of them ever grow up and stop having so much animosity towards women, gays, etc?
Imagine a world where you can't express your feelings. Where women are treated as objects or bargaining chips, and alcoholism and drug abuse are the norm. Where you must reject your own mother, and your father will rebuff you. You'll belong to a kind of cult that demands that you ostracize anyone who doesn't follow the group's twisted values. This cult may pressure you into physically and sexually abusing someone incapable of fighting back. If you're an American guy age 16-26, congratulations. You probably live there already.
This is especially true if you are white and heterosexual, according to SUNY-Stony Brook sociologist Michael Kimmel. "Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men," his study of young American men, is a bleak and urgent yet compassionate analysis of young manhood in the United States. Kimmel coins the term "Guyland" not to suggest a place as much as a state of mind, an ideology into which the 400 or so young men he interviewed in the course of his research find themselves indoctrinated. He also uses the term to describe a stage of life, "a kind of suspended animation between the dependency and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood" -- a phase that in recent years has expanded into many guys' 30s.
While a fair number of Kimmel's observations about this new demographic are depressingly familiar, he warns that the dangers posed by disgruntled guys will rise the longer we tolerate, brush off and deny their bad behavior. "The stakes are higher, the violence more extreme, the weapons more lethal," he writes. School shootings, a relatively new phenomenon, are increasing. A new generation of girls who don't consider themselves feminists and people of color who oppose affirmative action may find themselves against a wall -- or a glass ceiling -- they thought their mothers had climbed over. All in all, reading "Guyland" has the same effect on a liberal as a good horror movie; it makes you terrified of something you're so used to that you probably manage to ignore it most of the time.
Dude, where's my manhood? | Salon Books
"What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys," Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel's testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or "thresholders" and "kidults," as they've also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today's guys to don their fathers' robes—and commitments. They "see grown-up life as such a loss," says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they're running from may be the thing they need.
Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in "Guyland" | Newsweek Culture | Newsweek.com
So guys, do you feel this book is spot on?
Ladies, are you concerned about the future of the male species? As in, would some of them ever grow up and stop having so much animosity towards women, gays, etc?