Manchildren and the Women Who Enable Them

Betsy Hart writes in the Chicago Sun-Times:

A wealthy New York City bachelor put a curving, metal tube slide in his new $3 million duplex to connect the floors. How fitting for what even the Yahoo news item describing the hot property called the “manchild” owner.

Kay Hymowitz might call him a “pre-adult.” Her new book,Manning Up: How the Rise of Women has Turned Men into Boys (Basic Books, $25.99), speaks to the growing phenomena of young men in particular living in what seems like an extended adolescent playground.

Hymowitz, a scholar at the Manhattan Institute in New York City, is an acute observer of American cultural trends. In brutally descriptive terms, she chronicles what is happening with young American men: They are way behind women in all levels of schooling and now attend college at much lower rates; in most major U.S. cities, young women today, on average, have higher employment rates and make higher incomes than young men; if men marry at all, it’s much later in life than men of a few decades ago.

Uh-oh. What do my own daughters have in store for them then? When it comes to fellas, the picture isn’t rosy. Hymowitz says the script used to be clear: a young man got a high school diploma or more, went on to marry and have children all typically by the age of 25 or so. Those days are long gone. Education takes longer today. And the knowledge economy — think multitasking — more and more favors women.

So what’s a guy to do? Without a wife and children to care for, as I touched on in another column recently, men seem far less likely to simply grow up.

One might argue: So what? If a fellow wants to put a slide in his apartment and perhaps never marry, or marry late after sleeping with a bevy of women, what’s wrong with that?

Well, it’s not just that our daughters are profoundly affected, though they are. While men may not have much in the way of biological clocks, women most certainly do. And the pool of marriageable young men, those who are gainfully employed and want to provide and care for a family, is dwindling.

On the flip side, few men are going to find a life of extended boyhood with or without the apartment slide ultimately that rewarding, anyway. “Women Rule, Boys Drool” was the anthem of the girl-power movement of the 1990s. Men are just not built to want that as their legacy.

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