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MEN GROWING UP TO BE BOYS !!!!!

Arimaha qoyska maanta

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Daanyeer
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MEN GROWING UP TO BE BOYS !!!!!

Postby Daanyeer » Sat Apr 08, 2006 12:05 pm

Source: In These Times
March 17, 2006 Author: Lakshmi Chaudhry

........"American men may be doing their best to figure out what it means to be a man in the 21st century, but it’s no accident that these men—and more importantly, their sons—aren’t getting much help from the larger culture. “Consumerism wants to make us as atomized as possible—because the more individualized we are the better consumers we are,” says Simpson. “This is why masculinity is so fragmented today and incoherent—and irresponsible. It used to be the tradition. Literally passed down from father to son. But we live in a society where tradition stands in the way of profit. So bye-bye daddy.”

When CBS unveiled its short-lived series “Love Monkey” in January, leading male television critics could barely contain their enthusiasm. The New York Times’ Alessandra Stanley was far less impressed, especially with its lead male character, thirty-something music producer Tom Farrell, whose “endearing foibles” included “self-absorption, wanting what he cannot have and an inability to commit.”

Based on the eponymous 2004 novel by Kyle Smith, “Love Monkey” offered the latest iteration of “lad-lit,” a genre popularized by the likes of Nick Hornby, whose novels inevitably featured a confused, neurotic, discontented man-boy being dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood, usually by his girlfriend.

But where “lad lit” authors disguise the dumbing-down of adult masculinity with witty prose, advertising executives are less subtle. Commercials for cell phones, fast food, beer and deodorants offer up an infantilized version of masculinity that has become ubiquitous since the rise of “lad” culture in the ’90s. These grown men act like boys—and are richly rewarded for it. A recent cell phone ad, for example, features a guy who responds to being dumped by his girlfriend—because “you’re never going to grow up”—by playing, on his cell phone, an ’80s pop song that tells her to get lost. Of course, this immediately earns him the attention of a younger, prettier woman walking by. While these ads pretend to mirror a male fantasy—say, of walking down the wedding aisle armed with a six-pack of Bud Light—they in fact reflect a corporate executive’s dream customer: a man-boy who is more likely to remain faithful to their product than to his wife.

This shift in the dominant image of manhood is most evident in the evolution of the so-called “Family Man.” The benevolent patriarch of the ’50s has been replaced by an adult teenager who spends his time sneaking off to hang out with the boys, eyeing the hot chick over his wife’s shoulder, or buying cool new toys. Like a fourteen-year-old, this guy can’t be trusted with the simplest of domestic tasks, be it cooking dinner for the kids or shopping for groceries.

These pop culture images are all the more striking because they directly contradict the experiences of men in the real world. Women may still bear the greater burden of domestic work, but American males today do more at home than their fathers, and are happy doing it. According to the Families and Work Institute, the percentage of college-educated men who said they wanted to move into jobs with more responsibility fell from 68 percent to 52 percent between 1992 and 2002. A Radcliffe Public Policy Center report released in 2000 found that 70 percent of men between the ages of 21 to 39 were willing to sacrifice pay and lose promotions in exchange for a work schedule that allowed them to spend more time with their families.

Yet popular culture continues to fetishize the traditional, ’50s model of masculinity, but in a distilled form—kick-ass machismo stripped of the accompanying values of honor, duty and loyalty. We seem to have carried with us the unreconstructed sexism of the past—the objectification of women, inability to connect or communicate—but discarded its redeeming virtues. Where traditional masculinity embraced marriage, children and work as rites of passage into manhood, the 21st century version shuns them as emasculating, with the wife cast in the role of the castrating mother. The result resembles a childlike fantasy of manhood that is endowed with the perks of adulthood—money, sex, freedom—but none of its responsibilities.

At least part of this image is rooted in a real cultural trend, according to State University of New York at Stony Brook sociology professor Michael Kimmel. His upcoming book Guyland argues that men “are resisting becoming men longer and longer,” doing their best to postpone all the decisions that mark the passage into adulthood—getting a job, moving out of their parents’ home, getting married, and having kids—in order to enjoy the lad lifestyle of “online porn, drinking, and poker.” This trend has its big-screen avatar in the hero of the upcoming Failure To Launch, which stars Matthew McConaughey as a thirty-something slacker whose desperate parents “hire the gorgeous and talented girl of his dreams to get him to move out of the house.”

More significantly, however, this resistance to adulthood is closely associated with a market-driven consumerist culture that feeds and sustains a Peter Pan version of masculinity. “To be grown up is to be settled, comfortable, stable, responsible, and secure,” Kimmel says. “Those are bad conditions for advertising, which depends on our sense of insecurity, anxiety, and incompleteness.”

The market also has little time for the old-fashioned male virtue of self-denial, the imperative to do the “right thing” at the expense of pleasure. A stoic John Wayne has been replaced by the “metrosexual,” a man who is all about self-indulgence and defined almost entirely by his wallet. At the beauty salon, designer boutique or exclusive health club, a metrosexual spends, therefore he is.

Susan Faludi foreshadowed the rise of the metrosexual in her 1999 book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which describes an “ornamental culture” that tells men “manhood is displayed, not demonstrated. The internal qualities once said to embody manhood—sure-footedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose—are merchandised to men to enhance their manliness. What passes for the essence of masculinity is being extracted and bottled and sold back to men. Literally, in the case of Viagra.”

Before it was hijacked by marketing gurus to peddle body lotions and pedicures, British author Mark Simpson coined the word “metrosexual” in 1994 to connote an “epochal shift” to a narcissistic form of mediated masculinity; a man who “has clearly taken himself as his own love object and pleasure as his sexual preference.”

Contrary to popular understanding—fueled by conservatives who are fond of caricaturing liberals as well-coiffed and manicured wimps—Simpson does not define the metrosexual as particularly feminine or even gay, but as “a collector of fantasies about the male sold to him by the media.” Thus George W. Bush strutting around on an aircraft carrier is every bit as metrosexual as a teen idol like Orlando Bloom. In a media universe ruled by marketing gods, “the traditional forms and sufferings of stoic, self-denying, self-sacrificing old-fashioned masculinity are merely cutesy, quaint props for the new, aestheticised, moisturized self-regarding variety.” In the new millenium, it’s more important to look like a hero than act like one—as John Kerry could well testify.

That this market-driven narcissism finds expression in an adolescent version of masculinity should be no surprise. “In males, narcissism is something that has been associated with immaturity. Classically, it’s something men are supposed to abandon to become adult males,” Simpson says. “Today, consumerism tells all males that … they never need abandon their narcissism. That they never need grow up. Just so long as they buy the right products.”

This isn’t good news for either men or women. By defining domestic chores literally as “homework,” the teen slacker version of masculinity offers no respite for working women struggling to balance their lives. And if adult responsibilities are defined as emasculating, then it’s no wonder that popular culture now defines “commitment” solely as a woman’s goal.

Domesticity may have always been a feminine realm, but marriage and children were once defined as integral to the traditional gender roles of both men and women. Today, it’s the woman who is cast in the role of caveman, eager to club some unsuspecting, reluctant male on his head and drag him to the altar. While progressives and feminists have rightly championed a woman’s right to reject marriage and motherhood, they rarely address the consequences of living in a culture where pair-bonding and parenting—the basic processes that form the foundation of all societies—are constructed as the antithesis of masculinity.

As Neil Chethik, author of the newly published book VoiceMale: What Husbands Really Think About Their Marriages, Their Wives, Sex, Housework, and Commitment, found, most American men—the flesh-and-blood variety—embrace their roles as fathers and husbands. “I found in my research that the values of duty, honor, and taking responsibility are far from forgotten by men in our culture,” Chethik says. “Certainly, most men struggle to fulfill the ideals they set for themselves in this area. But they recognize that being a ‘real man’ requires that they are honest and respectful and willing to sacrifice. I saw this among men who worked at jobs they didn’t love, who took care of an ill spouse or child, who helped in their communities without recognition or compensation. There are millions of such men.”

American men may be doing their best to figure out what it means to be a man in the 21st century, but it’s no accident that these men—and more importantly, their sons—aren’t getting much help from the larger culture. “Consumerism wants to make us as atomized as possible—because the more individualized we are the better consumers we are,” says Simpson. “This is why masculinity is so fragmented today and incoherent—and irresponsible. It used to be the tradition. Literally passed down from father to son. But we live in a society where tradition stands in the way of profit. So bye-bye daddy.”

Discussions of masculinity on both the left and right inevitably circle around women’s equality, either as a curse or boon to men. Where some argue that the women’s movement has freed men from the straightjacket of traditional machismo, others have blamed it for depriving them of their identity. Yet the greatest threat to modern manhood may lie elsewhere—in the flickering images on our television screen, bought and paid for by corporate America. Feminism may have sparked the battle over gender roles, but its outcome may well be determined by market forces determined to make voracious consumers of us all.

Lakshmi Chaudhry has been a reporter and an editor for independent publications for more than six years, and is a Senior Editor at In These Times, where she covers the cross-section of culture and politics.

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Postby Daanyeer » Sat Apr 08, 2006 12:09 pm

What's Happening To Boys? : Young Women These Days Are Driven -- But Guys Lack Direction

Source: www.washingtonpost.com
March 31, 2006 Author: By Leonard Sax


......."What's happening to boys? We've batted around lots of ideas. Maybe the problem has to do with the way the school curriculum has changed. Maybe it has to do with environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls (not as crazy an idea as it sounds). Maybe it has to do with changes in the workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service industry. Maybe it's some combination of all of the above, or other factors we haven't yet identified."



The romantic comedy "Failure to Launch," which opened as the No. 1 movie in the nation this month, has substantially exceeded pre-launch predictions, taking in more than $64 million in its first three weeks.

Matthew McConaughey plays a young man who is affable, intelligent, good-looking -- and completely unmotivated. He's still living at home and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out with his buddies (two young men who are also still living with their parents) and having sex. In desperation, his parents hire a professional motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to fall in love with McConaughey's character in the hope that a romantic relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents' home and get a life.

The movie has received mixed reviews, though The Post's Stephen Hunter praised it as "the best comedy since I don't know when." But putting aside the movie's artistic merits or lack thereof, I was struck by how well its central idea resonates with what I'm seeing in my office with greater and greater frequency. Justin goes off to college for a year or two, wastes thousands of dollars of his parents' money, then gets bored and comes home to take up residence in his old room, the same bedroom where he lived when he was in high school. Now he's working 16 hours a week at Kinko's or part time at Starbucks.

His parents are pulling their hair out. "For God's sake, Justin, you're 26 years old. You're not in school. You don't have a career. You don't even have a girlfriend. What's the plan? When are you going to get a life?"

"What's the problem?" Justin asks. "I haven't gotten arrested for anything, I haven't asked you guys for money. Why can't you just chill?"

This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You'll find it in families both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents -- a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why?

My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She points out that many young women are living at home nowadays as well. But those young women usually have a definite plan. They're working toward a college degree, or they're saving money to open their own business. And when you come back three or four years later, you'll find that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal, or something like it. They've earned that degree. They've opened their business.

But not the boys. "The girls are driven; the boys have no direction," is the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, to figure out what's going wrong with boys. The project is only a few weeks old, it has called no news conferences and its Web site ( http://www.boysproject.net ) has just been launched.

So far we've just been asking one another the question: What's happening to boys? We've batted around lots of ideas. Maybe the problem has to do with the way the school curriculum has changed. Maybe it has to do with environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls (not as crazy an idea as it sounds). Maybe it has to do with changes in the workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service industry. Maybe it's some combination of all of the above, or other factors we haven't yet identified.

In Ayn Rand's humorless apocalyptic novel "Atlas Shrugged," the central characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that drives the world? We may be living in such a time, a time when the motor that drives the world is running down or stuck in neutral -- but only for boys.

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Postby mahamed99_sex » Sat Jun 10, 2006 11:15 pm

TOO LONG TO READ


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